Vocal Expression Part 23

We are ready now for the third exercise. When, for five minutes in the morning, lying flat on your back, with closed eyes, you have taken deep, long breaths, letting them go slowly, yielding your whole body to the act of respiration, noting the effect and fixing fast the sensation, as a next step you are to stand up and repeat the operation. Still holding the sensation (not by tightening your muscles, or clenching your fists, or setting your teeth, but simply by thinking the sensation, letting it possess you), in this att.i.tude of mind breathe naturally, standing instead of lying down. That is all. Don't be discouraged if the test prove unsatisfactory at first. Try an intermediate step. Sit on the side of your bed, or in a straight-back chair, and, closing your eyes and relaxing all your muscles except those governing the diaphragm, breathe.

Now stand, well poised. By well poised, of course, you know I mean with the weight perfectly balanced about the center of gravity, which, in turn, means that a perpendicular dropped from the highest point of the lifted chest without encountering any part of your body, and especially not your abdomen (which should be held always back, so that it is flat, if not actually concave) will fall un.o.bstructed to the floor, striking a point just between the b.a.l.l.s of your feet. Standing thus, well poised, place the right hand on your body, just below your ribs at the base of the lungs, and your left hand on your back, just opposite your right hand; then breathe, and feel the diaphragm, as it descends, cause the torso, in turn, to expand from front to back, pressing against either hand. Let the breath go slowly, controlling its emission by controlling the diaphragm.

So the three exercises stand progressively thus:

_First._--Breathe naturally, which is diaphragmatically, five minutes at night. (At first you can be sure of doing this only by lying flat on your back.)

_Second._--Breathe naturally, which is diaphragmatically, for five minutes in the morning, and note the sensation.

_Third._--Stand and test your newly acquired power by trying to breathe diaphragmatically while on your feet.

These three exercises const.i.tute the first step in the first stage of vocal training, and that step is called _Learning to Support the Tone_.

I know a little girl who, in the beginning of her career, alarmed her parents by refusing to utter a syllable or the semblance of a syllable until she was three years old, when she evidently considered herself ready for her maiden effort at speech. Prepared she proved, for, sitting at the window in her high-chair one day, watching people pa.s.s, she remarked quietly and with perfect precision, "There goes Mrs. Tibbets."

I find myself secretly wis.h.i.+ng it were possible for you to refrain from speech, not for three years, but for three weeks, while you quietly prepare for speech by practising these three breathing exercises. It is quite the customary thing (or ought to be) for the teacher of voice as an instrument of song to require of the student a period of silence--that is, a period in which only exercises are allowed, and songs, even the simplest, are forbidden. However, our only way to secure this condition would be to go into retreat; but, after all, one of the most encouraging things about this work is the remarkable effect upon the speaking voice of simply holding the thought of the right condition for tone, _thinking_ the three exercises I have given you. It is not so remarkable, perhaps, in the light of the experiment recently made (I am told) in one of our great colleges, when three men daily performed a certain exercise, and three other men simply thought it intensely, and the resultant effect upon the muscles used in the act was marvelously similar. I am half afraid to have recalled this, lest you take advantage of the suggestion and relax your effort, or, out of curiosity, make the experiment. Please don't. I offer it only as an incentive to you, to _think_ at least of the desired condition, if you cannot every day indulge in an active effort to attain it.

Please test at once the immediate effect of this third exercise. Take the att.i.tude I have defined, and try once more any full-voweled syllable. I think you will find the tone already improved.

LEARNING TO FREE THE TONE

We have worked, so far, for support of tone. We must now free the supported tone, by freeing the channel for the emission of the breath as it is converted into tone and moulded into speech. We shall find that in learning to support the tone we have gone far toward securing that freedom; but the habit of years is not easily overcome, and every time you have spoken without proper support of breath you have _forced_ the tone _from_ the _throat_, by tightening the muscles and closing the channel, thus making conditions which must now be reformed by steady, patient effort. Yet it is not effort I want from you now; it is _lack_ of effort. It is _pa.s.sivity_; it is _surrender_. I want you to relax all the muscles which govern the organs concerned in converting the breath into tone and moulding the tone into speech, all the muscles controlling the throat and mouth, including the lips and jaw. I want utter pa.s.sivity of the parts from the point where the column of breath strikes the vocal cords to where, as tone, it is moulded into the word "No." Surrender to the desire to utter that word. Concentrate your thought on two things: the taking of the breath and the word it is to become. Now, lying down, or sitting easily, lazily, in a comfortable chair, or standing leaning against the wall, with closed eyes, surrender to the thought "No," and, taking a breath, speak. Still hard and unmusical you find? Yes, but I am sure not so hopelessly hard as before.

What shall we do to relax the tense muscles, to release the throat and free the channel? At the risk of being written down a propagandist, in the ranks of the extreme dress-reformers, I shall say, first of all, take off those high, tight collars. Again, as with the corset, it is a case of a misfit rather than too tight a fit. If your collar is cut to fit, it need not be too high nor too tight for comfort, and it will still be becoming. You want it to cling to the neck and keep the line.

Cut it to fit, and it will keep the line; then put in pieces of whalebone, if necessary, or resort to some of the many other devices now in vogue for keeping the soft collar erect, but don't choke yourself, either by fastening it too tight or cutting it too high. But how simple it would be if we could relax the tension by doffing our ill-fitting corsets and collars. Alas! the trouble is deeper seated than that.

It is an indisputable and most unfortunate fact that nervous tension registers itself more easily in the muscles about the mouth and throat than anywhere else. So, if we live as do even the children of to-day, under excitement, and so in a state of nervous tension, the habit of speaking with the channel only half open is quickly formed, and the voice becomes shrill and harsh. You have noticed that the more emphatic one grows in argument the higher and harder the voice becomes, and, incidentally, the less convincing the argument. This is true of all excitement; the nervous tension accompanying it constricts the throat, and the result is a closed channel. To learn instinctively to refer this tension for registration not to the throat, but to the diaphragm, is a part of vocal training. This can be easily accomplished with children, and the habit established of taking a deep breath under the influence of any emotion. This breath will cause the throat to open instead of shut, and the tone to grow full, deep, and round, instead of high and harsh.

The full, deep, round tone will carry twice as far as the high, harsh, breathy one. The one deep breath resulting in the full, deep tone may--nay, will--often serve the same purpose as Tattycoram's "Count five-and-twenty," and save the angry retort.

It is useless to regret, on either ethical or aesthetic grounds, that we were not taught in childhood to take the deep breath and make the deep tone. But let us look to it that the voices and dispositions of our children are not allowed to suffer. Meanwhile, in correcting the fault in the use of our own instruments, we shall go far toward establis.h.i.+ng the proper condition with the next generation, since the child is so mimetic that, to hear sweet, quiet, low tones about him will have more effect than much technical training in keeping his voice free and musical. In the same way, the child who hears good English spoken at home seems less dependent upon text-books in grammar and rhetoric to perfect his verbal expression than the child who is not so fortunate in this respect.

To insure the registration of nervous tension in the muscles controlling the diaphragm and not the throat--that is, to form the habit of breathing deeply when speaking under the influence of emotion, is our problem. The present fault in registration will be found to be different with each one of us, or, at least, will cause us "to flock together"

according to the place of registration. Each must locate for himself his own difficulty, or go to a vocal specialist and have it located. The tension may be altogether in the muscles governing the throat, or it may be in those about the mouth. There is the resultant, _breathy_ tone, the _hard_ tone, the _nasal_ tone, the _guttural_ tone, the tone that issues from a set jaw or an unruly tongue. All mean tension of muscles somewhere, and must be met by relaxation of these muscles and the freeing of the channel. How to relax the throat shall be our initial point of attack. A suggestion made by my first teacher proved most helpful to me, a suggestion so simple that I did not for the moment take it seriously. "Think," she said, "how your throat feels just before you yawn." "Yes," I replied, irrelevantly, "and just after you have eaten a peppermint--that cool, delicious, open sensation." This impressed her as significant, but not so effective as her suggestion to me, which I felt to be true when I began to think of it seriously, and so, of course, to yawn furiously. Try it.

Think of the yawn. Close your eyes and feel how the deep breath with which the yawn begins (the need of which, indeed, caused it) opens the throat, relaxing all the muscles. Now, instead of yawning, speak. The result will be a good tone, simply because the condition for tone was right. The moment the yawn actually arrives, the condition is lost, the throat closes; but in that moment before the break into the yawn, the muscles about the throat relax and the channel opens, as the muscles controlling the diaphragm tighten and the deep breath is taken.

These, then, are the first exercises in the second step in vocal training. This step is called _Freeing the Tone_.

_First._--Yawn, noting the sensation.

_Second._--Just before the throat breaks into the yawn, stop, and, instead of carrying out the yawn, speak. Repeat this fifty times a day, or ten times, as often as you will. Only, keep at it. Take always a single full-voweled monosyllable; _one_, or _four_, or _no_, or _love_, or _loop_, or _dove_, etc.

We cannot, in a printed consideration, touch more in detail upon individual cases, but must confine ourselves to these simple exercises, which will, in general, be swiftly and effectively remedial.

But we must not stop with the throat, which is but part of the channel involved in the emission of breath as speech. There is the tense jaw to be reckoned with--the jaw set by nervous tension, the jaw which refuses to yield itself to the moulding of the tone into the beautiful open vowel and the clean-cut consonant which make our words so interesting to utter. It is the set jaw which, forcing the tone to squeeze itself out, causes it to sound thin and hard. Again, it is surrender and not effort I want. Just as I should try to secure the relaxation of your arm or hand by asking you to surrender it to me, drop it a dead weight at your side for me to lift as I choose, so now I ask you to surrender your lower jaw to yourself. Let it go.

Drop your head forward, resting your chin on your chest. Then raise your head, but not your chin. Let your mouth fall open. a.s.sume for the moment that mark of the feeble-minded, the idiotic, the dropped-open mouth, just long enough to note the sensation. Place your fingers on either side of your head where the jaws conjoin, and open your mouth quickly and with intention. Note the action under your finger-tips. Now let the mouth fall open, by simply surrendering the lower jaw, and note this time the lack of action under your fingers, at the juncture of the jaws.

It is this pa.s.sive surrender which we must learn to make, if we find, on investigation, that we are speaking through a half-open mouth held fast by a set jaw. The set jaw resists and distorts the mould, and the beauty of the form of the word which flows from the mould is lost; the relaxed jaw yields to the moulding of the perfectly modeled word.

In practising this relaxation there is very little danger of going too far, since the set jaw is the indication of a tense habit of thought, of a high-strung temperament, and this habit of thought will never become, through the practise of an outward mechanical exercise, the slack habit of thought which is evidenced by the loose dropping of words from a too relaxed jaw--a habit which must be met by quite the opposite method of treatment. There are many exercises involved in vocal training which must be directed very carefully for a time before the student can be trusted to practise them alone; so I am confining myself in this, as in every step we take together, to the simple, fundamental, and at the same time perfectly safe ones.

To review those for relaxation of the lower jaw:

_First._--Drop the head until the chin rests upon the breast. Raise the head, but not the lower jaw.

_Second._--With eyes devoid of intelligence and the mouth dropped open, shake the head until you feel the weight of the lower jaw--until the lower jaw seems to hang loosely from the upper jaw and to be shaken by it, as your hand, when you shake it from the wrist, seems to be commanded by the arm, and to have no volition of its own.

_Third._--Test your ability to surrender the jaw by placing your fingers on either side your head in front of the ears at the conjunction of the jaws, and first open your mouth with intention, noting the action; then think the word No, and surrender the jaw to the forming of the word, noting the action or absence of action again.

So much for the set jaw. Ten or fifteen minutes a day--yes, even five minutes a day of actual practice with the constant thought of surrender, will reward you. Try it.

And still the channel is not open. There remains that most unruly member, the tongue. Dora Duty Jones refers all faults of technique in speech to failure in the management of the tongue. Miss Jones bases her entire system upon the three words, "On the tongue," in Hamlet's injunction to the players: speak the speech ... trippingly _on the tongue_. That this organ plays a vital part in the presentation of speech is not to be questioned; that it is the chief actor may be disputed. But whether the tongue is to play a main or a minor part the training to which Miss Jones would subject it is most interesting, and _The Technique of Speech_[14] should belong to the library of every student of expression. The only danger of this training lies in that of making the tongue a self-conscious actor. What we require of the tongue is that it shall act as a free agent in modeling the perfect word. Many of the exercises given by Miss Jones can be safely attempted only after the preparatory freeing of the organ has been accomplished, but all of them will eventually repay investigation.

[14] _The Technique of Speech_, by Dora Duty Jones, published by Harper & Brothers.

Meanwhile the following drill for freeing the tongue ought to develop the agility we desire:

_First._--Combine _l_ (which may be called the tongue's pet consonant) with _a_ and repeat the syllable _la_ with constantly increasing speed to form the following groups: _la'_ ... _la la la'_ ... _la la la'_ ...

_la'_ ... _la'_.

_Second._--Change the accent over the vowel and repeat the exercise until all the sounds of _a_ are exhausted in combination with the _l_.

_Third._--Change the vowel and repeat the exercise until all the vowels have been used in combination with _l_.

_Fourth._--Change the consonant to _d_, then to _t_, then _n_, and repeat the exercise.

_Fifth._--Follow these exercises on groups of syllables with work on groups of words of one syllable beginning with _l_, such as: _late_, _lade_, _lane_, _lame_; _last_, _lack_, _lank_, _lapse_, _laugh_; _lean_, _least_, _leak_, _leap_, _lead_, etc.

Remember, we are considering primarily speech-_tone_ and not speech form, and that our aim in the exercise of the tongue is to keep it from interrupting the tone.

And now a word must be said as to the part the lips take in speech. It must be only a word, because here more than at any other point the work needs the careful supervision of a trained ear and trained eyes. Madame Ricardo yields to the lips control of the tongue, as she gives to the diaphragm control of the breath. I think she would make _easily on the lips_ rather than "trippingly on the tongue" the controlling principle in tone and speech. I shall give you but one exercise:

Combine the speech process _m_ with the vowel _[=e]_ and let the tone explode easily on the lips in the repeated syllable, _m[=e]_, _m[=e]_, _m[=e]_.

LEARNING TO REINFORCE THE TONE

And now we turn from the second step in the training to the third and last step--the _reinforcing_ of the supported and freed tone. It is again a freeing process. This time we are to free the cavities now closed against the tone; we are to use the walls of these cavities as sounding-boards for tone, as they were designed to be, so reinforcing the tone and letting it issue a resonant, bell-like note with the carrying power resonance alone can give, instead of the thin, dull, colorless sound which conveys no life to the word into which it is moulded by the organs of speech. How shall we free these cavities? I find myself now impatient of the medium of communication we are using. I want to make the tone for you. I want, for instance, to shut off the nasal cavity and let you hear the resultant nasal note, thin, high, unresonant, which hardly reaches the first member of my audience; then I want you to hear the tone flood into the nasal cavity, and, reinforced there by the vibration from the walls of the cavity, grow a resonant, ringing, bell-like note, which will carry to the farthest corner of the room without the least increase in loudness. But we must be content with the conditions imposed by print.

First, you must realize that so-called "talking through the nose" is not talking _through_ the nose at all, but rather failure to do so--that is, instead of letting the tone flood into the nasal cavity, to be reinforced there by striking against the walls of the cavity, which act as sounding-boards for the tone confined within that cavity, we shut off the cavity, and refuse the tone its natural reinforcement. It takes on, as a result, a thin, unresonant quality which we call nasal, although it is thin and unpleasing because it lacks _true nasal resonance_. The only remedy lies in ceasing to shut off the cavity. Think the sound [=oo].

Let the tone on which it is to be borne grow slowly in thought, filling, filling, and, as it grows, flooding the whole face. Let it press against your lips (in thought only as yet), feel your nostrils expand, your face grow alive between the eyes and the upper lip, that area so often inanimate, lifeless, even in a mobile, animated countenance. Now let the sound come, but let it follow the thought, flood the face, let the nostrils expand, feel the nasal cavity fill with sound; let it go on up into the head and strike the forehead and the eye-sockets and the walls of all the cavities so unused to the impact of sound, which should never have been shut out. Now begin, with lips closed, a humming note, _m-m-m_. Let it come flooding into the face, until it presses against the lips, demanding the open mouth. Now let it open the mouth into the _e_. Repeat this over and over--_m-[=e]_, _m-[=e]_, _m-[=e]_. Don't let the tone drop back as the mouth opens. Keep it forward behind the upper lip, which it has made full, and which, playing against, it tickles until we _must_ let the tone escape. Just as much of the day as possible, think the tone in a flood into the face, and as often as possible hum and let it escape, noting its increasing resonance. It will increase in resonance, I promise you. It will lose its thin, high-pitched nasal quality, and grow mellow and rich and ringing.

And so, with chest lifted, diaphragm at work, throat open, tongue free, jaws relaxed, and all the cavities concerned in vocalization open to the tone, as you breathe and yawn and hum, let it issue a full, round, resonant, singing note to add itself to the music of the world.

A LAST WORD TO THE PUPIL

Mr. William James tells us that we learn to swim in winter and to skate in summer. The principle underlying this statement is of immense comfort in approaching a cla.s.s in vocal expression. The hope of satisfying results is fostered by the knowledge that a mere statement of the fundamental facts of right tone production will do much toward inducing a right condition for tone. But I know, too, that immediate results depend upon immediate and faithful putting into practice of the principles set forth. A little practice every day will work swift wonders with the voice. And so, in leaving with you Madame Ricardo's watchwords, I also commend you to Ellen Terry's "infinite pains." When it means, as it does in pursuing this ideal, that we must be _on guard_ every waking instant--_for a time_; when it means a watch set (for a time) upon every organ involved in expression--lips, teeth, tongue, jaw, mouth, throat, chest, diaphragm, and all the muscles governing these organs; when it means a watch set (for a time) upon one's every thought and emotion lest it make false demands upon the sensitive instruments of their expression--then it becomes a daring device, indeed, to wear upon one's crest. Let us not hesitate to carve it there, when we realize that to follow it means culture, true culture, the culture which can only come through control and command of one's self.