Laryngeal height as seen in modern and historical vocal treatises, and instructional literature on historical performance practice

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Content LARYNGEAL HEIGHT AS SEEN IN MODERN AND HISTORICAL VOCAL TREATISES, AND INSTRUCTIONAL LITERATURE ON HISTORICAL PERFORMANCE PRACTICE by Stacey L. Helley A Master’s Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN EARLY MUSIC PERFORMANCE December 2015 Copyright 2015 Stacey L. Helley TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments............................................................................................. i List of figures.................................................................................................... ii Preface.............................................................................................................. iii Introduction..................................................................................................... iv Chapter 1 The larynx in the twenty-first century.….…………………………… 1 Chapter 2 Examples in Maffei’s discorso. …..............................................12 Chapter 3 Bérard’s moveable larynx........................................................24 Chapter 4 Garcìa’s description of voix claire and voix sombre....................37 Conclusion.......................................................................................................47 Bibliography.....................................................................................................50 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express my gratitude to Dr. Adam Knight Gilbert for his guidance and patience with this sprawling topic. His insights into performance practice have generated many questions that have propelled my studies at USC. Thanks to my thesis committee, especially Dr. Bruce Brown, for helping me improve my writing. Thank you to Lynn Helding for jumping in the deep end with us in the eleventh hour. I also wish to thank Dr. Kathleen Roland for inspiring my fascination with voice science as well as for her encouragement to keep going when I was stuck. And lastly, a special thanks to my mom for her unfailing support. ii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Laryngeal framework ................................................................................. 2 Figure 2. Intrinsic muscles of the larynx .................................................................. 3 Figure 3. Superior view of the glottis ...................................................................... 4 Figure 4. Lateral view of the vocal folds .................................................................. 4 Figure 5. Laryngeal muscles ...................................................................................... 5 Figure 6. Muscles of the neck ................................................................................... 6 Figure 7. Example of divisions in Maffei’s discorso ………………………………………….. 17 Figure 8. Genioglossus (tongue) muscle ……………………………………………………….. 20 Figure 9. Glottis seen from above ………………………………………………………………… 23 Figure 10. Bérard’s directions for Majestic sounds ………………………………………… 35 Figure 11. Larynx and palate during the voix clair and voix sombre positions ......... 39 iii PREFACE While living and studying voice in New York City in the late 1990s, I happened to attend a performance of a Handel opera at the New York City Opera. The aural experience had something special that lured me to the academic pursuit of early music. Most of my own training had been in informal settings, performing in musical theater, light opera and opera, but I was drawn to the music theater from the distant past because, strangely, the older music felt so fresh and appealing. Eventually, I yearned to return to a formal music education, but until I returned to school for a Master’s degree, I had never articulated how I “knew” what I knew about singing. When I met a colleague who was writing a paper on Jean-Antoine Bérard’s “high larynx,” my knee-jerk reaction was one of alarm and disappointment. Upon rational reflection, I became intrigued by the way my personal experience did not, in fact, match up with my knee-jerk reaction to the notion of a raised larynx. This awoke in me a curiosity to investigate the received wisdom on laryngeal height in the singing process. iv INTRODUCTION The vocal techniques of the past, inferred to have a higher larynx, are often dismissed as inferior in quality and volume. According to some scholarship on historical vocal techniques, there is an historical, wrong way to sing and a newer, correct way that is partly determined by the height of the larynx while singing. Richard Miller is, however, unconvinced of the inferiority of the first singers of opera in the early seventeenth century, and says so in his essay “On the Demise of the Studio Baroque Sound.” 1 Isabelle Emerson describes the known abilities of seventeenth-century singers to sing affectively and project for an audience of four to six thousand people. 2 If one must lower the larynx to achieve volume, and if the singers of the past are thought to have high or higher larynges, then something is amiss. The aim of my study is to learn how the larynx functions in classical singing today in order to clarify what it means to sing with a high or a low larynx. I want to unravel the language concerning a “high” larynx, to determine what physically happens during singing and see how that compares to proprioceptive descriptors of one’s larynx. My hypothesis is that one’s larynx may be “neutral” and that “high and “low” are, in fact, relative terms. Then we can apply this knowledge to historical treatises on singing to try to determine if one can make a recognizable, workable vocal sound per historical directives. 1 Richard Miller, On the Art of Singing (New York: Oxford University Press,1996), 129. 2 Isabelle Emerson, Five Centuries of Women Singers (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 12. Emerson is discussing Virginia Ramponi Andeini, who was Monteverdi’s Ariadne, first singer of the famous lament. “Moreover, she performed in a large theatre in the Gonzaga Palace in Mantua for an audience of between four thousand (one eye-witness) and six thousand (the court historian Federigo Follino), which indicates her ability to project vocally and emotionally must have been remarkable.” v People generally know a pleasing voice when they hear one, regardless of musical genre and in spite of variant opinions about what constitutes pleasing. Human voices are highly adaptable, expressive organs capable of making all manner of sounds. The vocal anatomy is complex. It includes muscles of the torso, the respiratory system, intrinsic and extrinsic muscles of the larynx, muscles of the neck, face, head and tongue, and even the pelvis and legs. What goes into making a pleasing sound? Most people are aware that they have vocal cords and some may know that the vocal cords reside in the larynx or “voice box,” but how a sound is made and why one voice is prettier than another remains mysterious to the average listener. Today’s vocal science tells us that the sine wave produced by vibrating vocal folds is “filtered” through the individual’s vocal tract, creating a unique voice. Equally complex is our proprioception of its workings. 3 Singers tend to be more aware of their vocal anatomy than non-singers, but to varying degrees. A fine professional singer may or may not know the names of all the muscles and their functions and no two singers would necessarily choose the same words to describe their own sensations. Professional singers today are not likely to identify, if they think about it at all, with having a “high larynx,” since the resultant sound is associated with the sound of beginners or untrained singers. But while a singer may not identify with it, it does not mean that they never have a “high” or comparatively “higher” larynx under certain conditions. It is not a 3 “Proprioception” is an individual’s awareness of how one’s muscles and nerves behave. Dr. Veera Asher’s 2009 dissertation “The Olympic Singer: Integrating Pilates Training into the Voice Studio” (DMA dissertation, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2009) is the tip of a pedagogical iceberg of study pertaining to vocal training via body awareness. Dr. Asher says, “Proprioception is the conscious and unconscious neuromuscular regulation of posture, movement, balance and body position,” iv. See also James Stark Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy (Toronto; University of Toronto Press Inc., 1999), 117-118. ! vi matter of absolutes —“high” versus “low”— but a question of comparatives, of “higher” versus “lower” than the position of the larynx at rest. There is also the matter of how an individual senses these levels of height and depression. Although singers may be aware that some vowels on certain pitches employ a higher position than others, it is neither absolutely “high” nor absolutely “low.” The idea of a “high larynx” can imply certain vocal sounds, but the context should always be considered. For example, a young singer who goes to his or her first official voice lesson, never having sung before, may approach an ascending scale with a larynx that ascends likewise. A young inexperienced sound will be the product of a “high larynx,” therefore, it is possible one may associate a high larynx with the unpleasant sounds of untrained voices. Conversely, a highly accomplished professional singer may be acutely aware of the nuanced movements taking place in his or her vocal instrument, including a larynx that has both comparatively high and low positions depending on pitch, vowel and desired vocal color. “Higher” and “lower” in this case refer to a middle ground or the larynx’s position “at rest,” and the degrees of high and low around its home position, while in physical reality are quite small, may be perceived as quite substantial. As training advances, the larynx stabilizes and no longer ascends with ascending pitch, but does that mean it no longer moves at all? Indeed, today’s vocal pedagogy acknowledges the larynx does move up and down within a narrow range in trained voices, as the earlier treatises say. This narrow range may be perceived as an ocean of range, or not be perceived at all. Other questions arise: is the trained larynx no longer “high” because it is now “low”? Would an X- vii ray or MRI show exactly what a singer perceives? Is it actually stable in a new neutral position? Is there a standard horizon line for the larynx at rest? In earlier musical literature, issues of laryngeal position or height can cause confusion due to descriptions of singing that may present proprioceptive differences as a universal truth. I hope to defend singers of earlier repertoires from the value judgment of inferiority based on laryngeal height and laryngeal flexibility – a technique we may have mislabeled or forgotten. When it comes to the perceiving the function of the larynx, opinions may differ to such a degree that the topic can provoke uncivil words. We need to transcend our personal semantics and find a neutral language in order to be able to explore the mechanics of the larynx. We must also be prepared to find relativity in our answers, to find more than one “right” answer and to maybe be satisfied with only an enlarged awareness of variables. This thesis will challenge the reader to hone their interpretive skills regarding historical texts and the scholarly commentaries of them. Chapter 1 will look at what is known about the meaning of laryngeal height according to modern pedagogy books informed by the modern science of anatomy and acoustics. This chapter also reveals some of the semantic issues surrounding interpretation of writings on the topic. Singers and teachers today lack a common vocabulary for describing this, because they lack a common experience of hearing and creating sound, let alone the words how to describe it. 4 4 See Scott McCoy’s Your Voice: an Inside View (Princeton, NJ: Inside View Press, 2004), 1–14. He has charted the interpretive responses of listeners who describe what they heard various recordings of singers. There are concentrations of agreements in the 40%–65% range, but no consensus. viii Chapter 2 will look at the earliest known written description of vocal emission by Giovanni Camillo Maffei from 1562. Known as Meffei’s discorso, this letter describes anatomy and vocal production per Galen and Aristotle. Maffei’s priorities for good singing do not center on laryngeal issues, which is normal in vocal treatises until the nineteenth century. The absence of direct mention of the larynx leaves us to infer answers to our questions. To help with inferences, this chapter will look to John Weinel’s 2009 dissertation on interpreting physical realities of historical exercises that involve laryngeal height. The chapter includes comments from Steven Plank’s book on Choral Performance (2004), in which he laments the modern technique’s loss of agility citing Maffei’s discorso as a source of pedagogy devoted to vocal agility, thus claiming its relevance to historical performance practice. In Chapter 3, features an unusual vocal treatise in which the author, Jean-Antoine Bérard, speaks explicitly about laryngeal height and laryngeal movement. Bérard was an haute-contre who sang in Rameau’s operas. Bérard’s L’Art du chant (1755) preserves his confident artistic pedagogy, which describes a larynx that moves. This moveable larynx is judged, in a modern article by John Wistreich from The Cambridge Companion to Singing (2007), as an example of inferior vocal technique compared to today’s. Both Bérard and Wistreich challenge a modern interpreter to acquire as many puzzle pieces as possible before accepting this judgment. Chapter 4 looks at García’s viox claire and voix sombre and their four base timbres. García is considered the father of modern vocal pedagogy yet his language (1847) is still confusing to us today. His descriptors help us understand the “new” vocal technique made ix famous by Gilles Duprez, which positioned the larynx in a comparatively lower position. In a modern article by Roger Freitas, he articulates the confusion that we have today when interpreting García’s nineteenth-century pedagogical language. The goal is to gain awareness of our received wisdom, and of the semantic issues concerning laryngeal height. I hope this thesis will inspire students of Historically Informed Performance Practice to study modern vocal pedagogy and discover the benefits of understanding the mechanics of vocal production before approaching historical documents on singing. 1 CHAPTER 1 THE LARYNX IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY The Human Voice: According to evolutionary science, this glorious instrument exists only through chance. Biologically, the larynx – without which there is no voice - is nothing more than a sphincter valve designed to protect the airway. When this valve is firmly closed, pressure can be raised in the torso to help with a variety of physical actions ranging from childbirth and defecation to lifting heavy objects. However, when this valve is gently closed during exhalation, only partially blocking the air, the moment of serendipity occurs; it begins to vibrate. These vibrations are passed in the air through the throat and mouth, where they are transformed into sounds we recognize as speech. The final miracle occurs when the sounds of speech are sustained in a musical fashion; singing. 1 Thus opens Scott McCoy’s Your Voice: An Inside View, a popular book for teaching the basics of vocal anatomy and acoustics. Like most pedagogy books, it teaches that the larynx is a complex of three cartilages at the top of the trachea. The larynx houses the vocal folds, which vibrate together to produces a sine wave that is filtered through the vocal tract, which can be heard by listeners as vocal sounds, from grunts to speech or the singing voice. The human vocal instrument is the negative space running from the top of the glottis to the lips. Mechanically speaking, to study singing is to learn the dynamic muscular interactions of the vocal tract and breathing mechanism, which adjust their shape and tonus for various combinations of vowel, consonant and pitch. 2 The larynx, containing the vocal folds, is at the bottom end of the negative space so its height influences, and is influenced by, the overall shape of the negative space according to the singer’s intentions. 1 Scott McCoy, Your Voice: An Inside View (Princeton, NJ: Inside View Press, 2004), 1. 2 Tonus refers to the normal, balanced muscle tensions present in a healthy voice. 2 The larynx consists of the thyroid cartilage, the cricoid cartilage and a pair of arytenoid cartilages (see figure 1). The vocal folds are suspended within these three cartilages with the aid of sets of small essential “intrinsic” muscles that originate and insert among these cartilages (see figure 2). When the crico-thyroid muscles contract, the thyroid cartilage tips forward on a synovial joint and stretches and thins the vocal folds. As it tilts back the folds return to their resting state. Unlike the string of a violin or the reed of a clarinet, the vocalis muscle does not only lengthen and shorten, but can also thicken and thin itself in various combinations. Figure 1. Laryngeal framework. The inferior horn is where the synovial joint is located. The posterior view on the right shows the arytenoid cartilages. From Scott McCoy, Your Voice: An Inside View, Princeton, NJ: Inside View Press, 2004, 113–14. The vocalis muscle originates from the thyroid cartilage and stretches back to the arytenoid cartilages on either side. Along the inside line, the vocalis muscle, also known as the vocal folds, is reinforced by a ligament (see figures 2 and 3). The vocal folds are so called because they are like layers of tissue or Jell-O at different degrees of being set (see 3 figure 4). The arytenoids draw the two sets of folds together. The force of the arytenoid closure affects the “closed quotient,” or the amount of surface area contact between the folds. It is one of many potential capacities of the human voice to create sounds, exceeding its role as mere sphincter valve. Figure 2. Intrinsic muscles of larynx: a) posterior-lateral view, b) anterior-lateral view, c) superior view of transverse section at the level of the vocal folds. From Ingo Titze, Principles of Voice Production, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994, 12. In the figure below (see figure 4), you can see the large curving edge of the vocal fold. This shape can morph from a thin, taut edge to a thick area of tissues rippling together. The greater the surface-area contact, the more time the folds touch. A greater closed quotient is desirable as it produces a rich tone necessary for achieving the singer’s formant. 4 3. 4. Figures 3–4. 3. Superior view of the glottis. From Scott McCoy, Your Voice: An Inside View, Princeton, NJ: Inside View Press, 2004, 118. Figure 4. Coronal section through the right vocal fold showing layers of tissue and their densities. From Ingo Titze, Principles of Voice Production, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994, 17. The reader will likely be familiar with the terms “chest voice” and “head voice.” These are vocal registers defined as: . . . a series of consecutive and homogenous tones going from low to high, produced by the development if the same mechanical principle, and whose nature differs essentially from another series of tones equally consecutive and homogenous produced by another mechanical principle. 3 Chest voice is the sound of the vocal folds being drawn together with predominantly thyro- arytenoid (TA) muscular action. The sound of head voice is produced by predominantly crico-thyroid (CT) muscular action (see figure 5). Today, singers train these small muscles to blend registration into a single homogeneous sound throughout one’s vocal range, but historically, there is evidence that register colors were accepted and even highlighted. 3 Manuel Garcia Jr., A Complete Treatise on the Art of Singing. trans. by Donald V. Paschke. 2 vols. Vol. 1. New York: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1984, xli. 5 Figure 5. The muscles responsible for head and chest voice sounds. From Ingo Titze, Principles of Voice Production, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994,197. There is an excellent illustrative black-and-white movie from 1960 called The Vibrating Larynx, currently viewable on YouTube. 4 In spite of the video’s age, the fundamentals of laryngeal structure shown remain relevant. The video clearly depicts the components of the larynx and its very small muscles, and it demonstrates how each muscle pulls the cartilages and suspends the vocalis muscle. From without, the larynx is suspended by eight strap muscles: four down-pulling (the infrahyoids: omohyoid, thyrohyoid, sternohyoid and sternothyroid) and four up-pulling (suprahyoids: digastric, stylohyoid, mylohyoid, geniohyoid). In reality, there are many more up-pulling muscles than the suprahyoids. The infrahyoids are decidedly out-numbered, so it takes training to teach the larynx not to rise, as the goal is for the larynx to be relatively stable. Raising the larynx moves the glottis, thus changing both the length of the vocal tract above it and the pressure of the air-flow beneath it. Not only is the length changed by the 4 Produced at Groningen University in the Netherlands (where Donald Miller advances his work in vocal resonance), by Janwillem van den Berg, William Vennard (of USC), D. Burger, M.D., and C. Shervanian. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=204cBDG4fhU 6 height of the larynx, but the width is also altered. The larynx cannot rise without a corresponding lowering of the velum, or soft palate, and narrowing of the pharyngeal space. As the larynx lowers, the velum rises and the pharyngeal space expands. This lower position with large pharyngeal space is also known in vocal pedagogy as the gola aperta, or open throat. Figure 6. Neck muscles, eight of which are also known as the strap muscles. From Clifton Ware, Basics of Vocal Pedagogy: The Foundations and Process of Singing (San Francisco: McGraw Hill, 1998), 104. When the vocal folds vibrate against each other a sine wave issues from the glottis up and through the vocal tract. When that wave exits past the lips it meets a new air pressure and some of the wave is reflected back into the vocal tract. When the outgoing and reflected waves synchronize (their compression and rarefaction), resonance begins. The sine wave created by the vocal folds responds to variations in the negative space of the vocal tract to create nuanced vocal colors or timbres. This is how the singing voice is “played” 7 and why the position of the larynx matters. The larynx sits on top of the trachea, which is attached to the lungs, which are in turn attached to the diaphragm. When we inhale, the larynx lowers gently and in proportion with the diaphragm, which pulls the lungs open, along with a lateral stretch of the intercostal muscles. The diaphragm lowers anywhere from 7 to 14 cm. We call this “tracheal pull.” 5 It is neither a large movement, nor a forceful one. We breathe in and out all day and are scarcely aware of it. When phonation begins the instant after inhalation, the larynx may stay in its gently lowered position or return to its neutral position. Scott McCoy says that after inhalation the larynx ought not be held firm. Regardless of where the larynx is positioned, it must not be held rigidly in place. Strong muscular antagonism is unwelcome in this aspect of vocal technique. Much better success will be found by allowing the laryngeal elevators to remain relaxed during singing, thereby allowing gravity – assisted by the gentle anchoring of the depressor muscles – to easily maintain a stable laryngeal posture. Some vertical movement, however, is probably still required. Subtle adjustments to laryngeal height can assist in formant tuning, assisting to make the small variations in the vocal tract length that synchronize resonance frequencies with the fundamental or one of its harmonics. 6 The vocal tract acts as a filter for the sine wave, which is reflected and synchronized in the negative space inside the tube. 7 The sine wave issuing from the glottis needs an adjustable tube or filter in order to achieve the right pitch and vowel. Formant tuning makes the voice more efficient as well as more beautiful. When the vocal tract adjusts to capitalize on the 5 McCoy, 129–30. 6 McCoy, 130. 7 When the sound wave exits the mouth cavity it arrives at a different air pressure against which some of the wave is reflected back into the vocal tract. In the sine wave, the air molecules bunch up then spread apart (compression and rarefaction). Synchronizing the wave is synchronizing the compressed and the rarefied lengths of the wave. 8 reflecting wave, a singer can maximize color, tone and or volume using fewer muscles. When we hear the term “low larynx” in vocal pedagogy, to what should “low” be compared? Should “low” be compared to an untrained singer’s attempts at ascending pitches, or compared to its own position at rest? Do we push it down? Press it down? Hold it down? We already know that tracheal pull lowers our larynx from its position at rest, but how low is too low? Clifton Ware discusses laryngeal position in Basics of Vocal Pedagogy and cites Ingo Titze, a leader in the field of voice science: Not every voice expert favors a low larynx. Titze, for instance, makes a case for allowing the larynx to remain in a neutral position during singing. He contends that the larynx bunches up against the tracheal mucosa when depressed too far, causing the vocal folds to thicken. Conversely, when the larynx was raised, the vocal folds are thinned and there is greater potential for producing intense sounds, primarily because the medial surfaces can make better contact and a firmer glottal closure. Furthermore, the lowered larynx elongates the vocal tract, lowers the formant frequencies, and produces a darker sound quality, while the raised larynx shortens the vocal tract, raises the formant frequencies and produces a brighter sound quality. Titze sees laryngeal positioning as related more to personal taste than to vocal survival, with no overwhelming advantage to either method even though he thinks it may be necessary to experiment a little on an individual level based on the individual’s neck and laryngeal architecture. 8 In his interpretation, Ware suggests that Titze’s viewpoint is out of the ordinary, that a neutral laryngeal position is not standard even though science can prove the unpleasant tonal consequences of too high or too low a laryngeal position. McCoy also states: While classical singers generally eschew the high laryngeal position, some favor the opposite approach: active laryngeal depression. In this technique, the depressor muscles pull the larynx into its lowest possible position in the neck. The acoustic effect is opposite that of elevation, with all the formant 8 Ware, 143–44. 9 frequencies being uniformly lowered. This results in a darker, rounder sound. Active depression, however, also has the potential to induce excess tension in the intrinsic laryngeal musculature. In this author’s opinion, the ideal laryngeal singing posture is one that allows the larynx to remain at or very slightly below its natural resting place…. 9 Barbara Doscher recommends a gently, “not uncomfortably,” lowered laryngeal position for covering and in register blending. 10 She recommends that a singer cultivate a supple instrument and warns against too low a position, which is “acoustically worthless.” If a voice lacks resonance, it will have no carrying power and indeed be acoustically worthless. She continues: Vennard and Hirano found that an excessively low larynx produced even higher muscular exertion in the intrinsic muscles. This kind of position is inefficient as well as vocally tiring because the great increase in dynamic level, which is expected, does not occur. 11 Doscher explains that the laryngeal height sets the pitch’s fundamental and its subsequent partials. Ideally, a voice gains volume (amplitude) by layering resonance, that is to say, by exploiting vowel formants on certain pitch levels to concentrate the synchronized sound waves. The height of the larynx is only one facet of shaping the vocal tract to tune vowel formants so a singer’s voice can carry over its accompaniment. A vocal sound that has been produced with only a view to laryngeal height may feel loud to the singer, but it may lack 9 McCoy, 129. 10 Barbara Doscher, The Functional Unity of the Singing Voice (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 1994), 154. “Covering” is defined as a muscular shift to accommodate a register transition that resets the larynx a bit lower than where it is, and a widening of the pharynx. It is used most often in reference to the tenor voice. 11 See Doscher, 184. William Vennard of USC and Minoru Hirano of UCLA advanced the field of vocal pedagogy in the 1960s and beyond. 10 resonance and complementary partials to the listener, which translates into a dull, coarse sound. Mere volume, minus its relevant timbres, misses the point of the vocal art. Richard Miller acknowledges this low larynx pedagogy in Solutions for Singers: Question I have read that a singer can raise the larynx to produce one kind of timbre and lower it for another. How does that fit in with your insistence on a stabilized laryngeal position during singing? Comment From the 1940’s to the mid-1960’s, laryngeal depression for singing was a relatively popular pedagogic concept in North America. It was based on the notion that the elongation of the vocal tract (through extended laryngeal lowering) would produce beneficial resonance by increasing the strength of the first formant. This hypothesis still has a minority of adherents on both coasts of the North American continent, in some Nordic/Germanic schools, and even within a few widely spread voice therapy systems…. 12 He does not cite the origin of this dated pedagogy, but accepts it a priori. In spite of the availability of this information since the 1960s, writings on singing continually use “low larynx” as a blanket term without exception, variation or explanation. The matter of laryngeal position is one of perceived degrees. Serious vocal study takes many years, and during those many years a student’s concentration will migrate through the instrument; the perceived amount of laryngeal activity will be determined by where a student is in his or her study. As the student develops, so will his or her perception. This matters because proprioceptive experience varies, as will subsequent 12 Richard Miller, Solutions for Singers: Tools for Performers and Teachers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 55–56. 11 written description of it. Whatever one’s perception, leading experts on the singing voice concur that there is movement. Miller says, in National Schools: However, extreme forms of laryngeal elevation or of laryngeal depression are not generally involved in the performances of premier singers, regardless of their origin. But when these events do occur, the results on the vocal spectra are immediately audible, and they can be verified by spectrographic analysis. Because no singer is perfect, such faults tend to invade public performance of even good singers who try to combine national tonal preferences with international aesthetics. 13 Miller advises against “extreme forms of laryngeal depression” because such depression is known to be a detrimental method of teaching. 14 Preserved vocal pedagogies tell us that singers’ concerns were for aesthetically pleasing results: beautiful tone, clear diction and affective color. If they achieved those things, modern science tells us that their larynges must have been at least stable. Unlike a reed instrument, the resonator of the vocal instrument is entirely dynamic, which makes the singer’s art imprecise and mysterious. As the following chapters will show, there was a shift — an inversion — in perception regarding the larynx. Prior to the nineteenth century, singers and teachers knew that the larynx moved, but we today may discern from treatises that include vocal exercises that it remained relatively stable. Conversely, after the nineteenth century, the larynx was thought to lie still and lower than neutral, when in fact, it does move. 13 Richard Miller, National Schools of Singing: English, French, German, and Italian Techniques of Singing Revisited, (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 1997), xxviii. 14 This is discussed further in Chapter 4. 12 CHAPTER 2 EXAMPLES IN MAFFEI’S DISCORSO One of the earliest written descriptions of vocal emission we know of is a mini- treatise in the form of personal letter, inside a cache of many other letters, written in 1562 in Naples, intended for publication within an elite readership. 15 There are many writings on the art of singing prior to this one; however, discussion of the process of vocal emission is conspicuously absent. It may be that such discussion was thought redundant, as vocal emission was so thoroughly covered in the study of rhetoric, which included nuances of delivery, and which was taught to every educated boy from the medieval era well into the Enlightenment. Maffei’s work, however, shows us an emerging language of vocal pedagogy. The letter-cum-discourse on voice was written by Giovanni Camillo Maffei to his employer, Giovanni di Capua, Count of Altavilla, who was curious to know if one could learn to sing articulated fioratura without the aid of a teacher. The whole title is: Delle lettere del Signor Gio. Camillo Maffei da Solofra, Libri due. Dove tra gli altri bellissimi pensieri di Filosofia, e di Medicina, v’è un discorso della Voce e del Modo d’apparare cantar di Garganta, senza maestro, non più veduto, n’istampato. [The Letters of Signor Giovanni Camillo Maffei da Solofra, in Two books. Where among other most beautiful thoughts on Philosophy and Medicine, there is a discourse on the Voice and the Method of learning to sing Ornamentation, without a teacher, not seen before, nor printed.] 16 15 See Nanie Bridgman “Giovanni Camillo Maffei et sa letter sur le chant,” Revue de Musicologie, 38, No. 113 (July, 1956), 3-34, 4. 16 Late Renaissance Singing: Giovanni Camillo Maffei, Discourse on the voice and the method of learning to sing ornamentation without a teacher (1562); Lodovico Zacconi, the practice of music, book one, chapters LVIII-LXXX (1592); Giovanni Battista Bovicelli, Rules, Passages of Music (1594); Giovanni Luca Conforto, Brief and easy method... (1603?), trans. Edward V. Foreman (Minneapolis: Pro Musica Press and Edward V. Forman, 2001), 1. 13 Little biographical information survives about Maffei beyond his employment by the Count of Altavilla from 1562 to 1573 and the fact that he was not only a singer, but also a lutenist, philosopher, and physician. The Count was curious about a particular type of vocal ornamentation, the garganta. 17 In Florio’s dictionary of 1611, gargareggiare is translated as “to gargarize,” to gurgle, also to ratle [sic] in the throat.” 18 It refers to an articulated, rapid type of coloratura or trill (on one note). Foreman translates garganta as “throatings” in order to preserve something of the meaning, but we remain unsure about how these may have been executed. 19 Was this some special way to engage the laryngeal muscles, or were audiences simply marveling at the singer’s skill and focusing on the performer’s throat because they understood simply that sound issued from the larynx? The execution of rapid passage-work is a skill that most singers would be at pains to describe, because both the sensations experienced and the language to describe it are highly individual. Maffei’s science, or philosophy, was based on Aristotle (388 BCE–322 BCE) and Galen (129 CE–c. 200 CE). Galen’s On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body describes nerve 17 Foreman, 8: “The Sweet Harmony of the most pleasurable song, which is heard in the home of Your Most Illustrious Lordship, at the hour set aside for that undertaking, has perhaps presented the occasion for asking me about the voice, and the way in which one might be able to undertake in order to learn to {sing} passaggi with the throat without a master.” 18 http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/florio/ 19 An example of a curious throating technique is Christina Deutekom singing the triplet section (at 1:55) of Mozart’s “Der Hölle Rache” from Die Zauberflöte http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gohnkWnCmiE I do not suggest this is the sort of articulation early singers used, but it is highly unusual and worth hearing. 14 pathways, muscle connections and the flexibility of the trachea and larynx. 20 Maffei’s descriptors are just like Galen’s. His is a highly functional blend of anatomy and spirit, much like today’s holistic approaches. Maffei was aware of nerve-to-muscle connections pertaining to the voice running throughout the body. He reduces the vocal instrument to a motor, vibrator and resonator. About the larynx, Maffei only says: . . . to make the voice requires the repercussion 21 of the air… it is necessary at the head of the pipe (trachea) to have many cartilages, many nerves, and many muscles, so that the cartilages now shut, and now open by the nerves and muscles …taking the breath to the heart, and forming the voice… The head of the pipe is made up of three cartilages, of which the largest shows us the form of a shield: it is at that point where it may be seen in the throat of every man, and in order to defend that spot it is very hard, and like a shield. So it is called “shield-like.” (scudiforme) Inside the space of this there is another, made for more defense, should the first one not suffice, and it is without a name. Behind this one, that is in the middle of this place, there is another called “chanter” (cimbalare), made in the likeness and guise of the tongue of the bagpipe (sampogna), and this one makes the repercussion of the air, and the voice. 22 Unfortunately, this awkward description creates more questions than it answers. We recognize the Adam’s apple on the thyroid cartilage, but then it gets unclear. “Inside the space” and “made for defense” may refer to the epiglottis, but “it is without name.” The epiglottis is clearly defined in Florio’s dictionary of 1611, albeit several decades after Maffei’s book was published, so it seems likely he would have known its name. The second cartilage of defense, the “chanter,” may be the glottis. The cricoid cartilage, when viewed 20 Galen, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, trans. Margaret Tallmadge May (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 216: “Many large muscles have been placed in the epigastric region to help in the emission of breath and the phonation of the voice...” See also 275, 280, and 354–56. 21 A note on the word “repercussion”: Florio’s 1611 dictionary has ripercussione, meaning a “beating, a smiting, a striking again. Also a repercussion, a reflecting or reverberation. Also a ringing or resounding back.” Maffei may be alluding to resonant properties of vocal sound. 22 Foreman, 11. 15 from above, looks concentrically smaller (like looking down a ringed funnel) than the thyroid cartilage and the vocal folds therein create a closable barrier for defense. Maffei says the “chanter” is “made in the likeness of the tongue of the bagpipe,” which has given modern interpreters the idea that he means the epiglottis, as it can be called tongue-like. However, if one holds a bagpipe reed vertically by the stem (of its tongue-like shape) and looks down at the split reed, it resembles the opening of the glottis. I am convinced that Maffei is talking about the glottis, particularly because the passaggi he has been asked to explain are articulated so that each fast note is heard and this type of articulation is made with the glottis. Maffei says singing is “caused by the soul” or imagination. In other words, the desire to express something sets the process in motion. This idea can also be found in Clifton Ware’s Basics of Vocal Pedagogy (1998), in which he says the desire to make sound starts the neural processes (in the brain) for communication that eventually coordinate in singing. 23 The brain aims at a desired result and the body and vocal apparatus make it happen. Maffei tells the Count about the vocal anatomy, but when it comes to singing he is goal-oriented rather than method-oriented. He is not concerned about how isolated pieces of the anatomy are working during singing, only that the singer achieves his artistic aims. Because Maffei does not isolate one part of the vocal mechanism, he never discusses depressing or lowering his larynx. 23 Ware, 54. 16 The discorso is ultimately about passaggi, or rapid divisions, an embellishment style that required vocal flexibility. 24 Maffei’s fioratura was completely agile. We can infer a few things by looking at a few of the items on Maffei’s list of ten instructions. In rule four, he says that the “chanter” alone should be allowed to move. 4. There should be no movement in other parts of the body, aside from the chanter cartilage, because it looks ugly to us when some who sing agility [sic] shake the head, or tremble with the lips…. External physical tension, mentioned above, is energy the singer has yet to focus into the vocal production or release, but control of the glottal closure is far more nuanced. In this case, is Maffei referring to the glottis, looking like a double reed whose halves must vibrate against one another, or the thyroid notch, the Adam’s apple, visible on the exterior of the neck, moving up and down while singing? In either case, the larynx, because it is attached to both the epiglottis and the vocal folds, would be mobile. There are other issues in the music of the period that add pieces to the puzzle of laryngeal position. The discorso includes a four-voice (SATB) madrigal in order to show when and where it is appropriate for each singer to embellish his or her line. Almost every ornament is set on an [o] vowel (see figure 7). 25 The [o] vowel automatically sets the larynx lower than its position at rest. Vowels have a signature shape within the vocal tract, which does include the height of the larynx as the bottom end of the tube. The [o], [u], and [a] 24 Many division manuals survive with similar patterns of notes for both instruments and voice. The manuals by Diego Ortiz (1553), Giovanni Luca Conforto (1593), Girolamo dalla Casa (1584), Giovanni Battista Bovicelli (1594), Sylvestro Ganassi (1535), et al. are useful for singers. 25 See Late Renaissance Singing, 20–14. 17 vowels have a lower laryngeal height than [æ], [ɛ], and [i]. 26 While it is not always possible to have text set to an [o] vowel, a singer can learn the resultant benefits of the [o] vowel. Figure 7. Excerpt from cantus part of the madrigal in Maffei’s discorso in which the embellishing divisions are set on [o]. From Delle lettere del Giovanni Camillo Maffei, Naples: Raymondo Amato, 1562, 42. John Weinel’s dissertation covers exactly this issue of laryngeal position in Maffei’s discorso, determining that the [o] vowel automatically positions the larynx in a comparatively low position. He also analyses directives in the treatises of Zacconi (1592), Mancini (1774), Corri (1810) and Celoni (1810) and concludes that the vocal exercises achieve the aesthetic goals that are, in fact, the result of a laryngeal position that is neutral or lower, but not in extremis, as in today’s pedagogy. He also states that singing fioratura on [o] will automatically set the larynx at a comparatively lower-than-neutral level, even if by insensible degrees (see Chapter 3). 27 Shaping vowels on specific pitches is the singer’s art. 26 See William Vennard’s chapter on vowels in Singing, the Mechanism and the Technic (New York: Carl Fischer, 1967), 123. 27 John Weinel, “The Historical Italian School’s Method For Breath Management and Registration in Singing and its Effect on Laryngeal Posture” (DMA diss., University of Houston, 2009), 64. 18 Weinel’s work invites singers to consider that past pedagogies may actually contain more similarities to modern pedagogies than differences. When the rapid passage-work is set on certain vowels, it helps set the dispozitione of the voice – another term, albeit a rather vague one, used in sixteenth-century vocal language. It generally refers to whether or not a singer’s voice was, by nature, disposed to good singing or not, but Maffei uses it in reference to the vocal technique needed to perform passaggi, which were not suited to all dispositions. The mysterious nature of the production of passaggi also leads us to think of the disposizione in terms of “placement” of the voice. 28 In this context, I use “placement” to mean the sensation of balanced vibrations and air pressures that allow for the voice to execute particular musical feats. A larynx pressed too low, will be ill placed to execute rapid fioratura. When intrinsic muscles of the larynx engage in pulling or holding the larynx too low, those same muscles are no longer free to meet the muscular needs of articulated passaggi. The muscles of the larynx must be nimble and available for rapid changes of pitch and vowel. A savvy composer, however, can help the singer by setting challenging passage-work strategically over certain vowels, so the singer’s laryngeal height is set to succeed. Weinel points out that Maffei tells a singer he must “acquire the disposizione of the throat.” This suggests that Maffei believes a singer can learn it, if it does not come 28 The term “placement” is both loaded and meaningless. I’m using it here to mean the sensation of tone (sympathetic vibrations, various compression sensations) when the whole voice is working correctly. Lamperti says, “Voice-finding” is a more appropriate expression. See G. B Lamperti, Vocal Wisdom, trans. William Earl Brown (New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1957), 74. 19 naturally. I agree with Weinel when he says he believes Maffei’s definition of “disposition” is a larynx in a stable, neutral posture. 29 Maffei tells the singer: . . . after the hour when he will have digested his meal, [he] should go to some resonant valley, or cave, or other place and holding a mirror before his eyes, has stretched the tongue in the manner described, and has held his head still along [sic] with every other part of the body, should push the breath out little by little with these notes, forming the letter [o] in his mouth. 30 While the [o] vowel can sweeten the vocal tone, other vowel choices can have aesthetically appalling consequences in terms of the resultant tone quality. Maffei discusses how the [u] vowel can sound as if one is “imitating a howling wolf.” He explains that [u] increases “the dread and shadow of the sound,” and that the [i] vowel can “sound like a small animal which is wailing because it has lost its mother.” 31 The height of the larynx adjusts, with each of the five vowels with [a] requiring the lowest position and [i] the highest. The issue of laryngeal height is couched in language that discusses vowels. Maffei also mentions mouth and jaw positions, which will also directly influence the laryngeal position. Each vowel needs a particular vocal-tract position, which includes an appropriate laryngeal height. 32 Maffei’s rules six and seven are also examples of other components that establish a stable laryngeal posture. 29 Weinel, 61. 30 Foreman, 19. 31 Ibid., 25. 32 Each vowel has its own acoustic signature achieved by its own vocal-tract configuration. William Vennard, in Singing: The Mechanism and the Technic (133) uses X-ray images of his own head and neck to demonstrate the different laryngeal positions of [a], [u] and [i]. 20 6. The sixth [rule] is to extend the tongue in such a way that the point comes to touch the roots of the lower teeth. At all times during singing, this is meant to ensure that the tongue (the blade, the heel and the root) is not slipping backwards, lowering the larynx and clogging the tract. The genioglossus muscle (tongue) is large and deep (see figure 8). The free-floating hyoid bone is the link between the “root” of the tongue (genio-hyoid) and the thyro-hyoid muscle. When the tongue slips backward, the larynx is lowered to a “too low,” extreme place, causing the voice to lose agility and clear tone. 33 The root of the tongue connects to the hyoid, which connects to the thyro-hyoid muscle, and influences the height of the larynx. When the tongue slips back, and the larynx accommodates it by moving downward beyond a healthy low point, it causes singers to become hoarse. By following Maffei’s advice, singers have a good chance of making a clear, pleasing tone and achieving good vowel formants (the vowel’s acoustic signature). Figure 8. From Maribeth Bunch-Dayme, Dynamics of the Singing Voice, 5 th edition (Vienna-New York: Springer-Verlag, 2009), 92. 33 The genioglossus muscle and the geniohyoid insert into the hyoid bone (as their names state), and the thyro-hyoid muscle joins them to the larynx. See Vennard, 97. 21 Rule seven complements the sixth to remind the singer that he needn’t open his mouth too far, which would adversely affect the placement of the tongue. 7. The seventh is to hold the mouth open appropriately, no more than when speaking with friends. This speaks to the notion that singing does not require any crazy gymnastics beyond the way that we use our voices every day in normal circumstances. Young singers will often spend their energies over-enunciating, over-using their articulators (the jaw, tongue and lips). Exaggerated use of the articulators prevents the sine wave from reflecting and gathering resonance, because the shape of the tube is not stable. This directive to hold the mouth open “no more than when speaking with friends,” and descriptions of the unappealing results when this admonishment is ignored, can be found in works on singing from Gaffurius (1496) to Mancini (1777) and beyond. 34 If a singer’s desired goal is to sing rapid fioratura, the simultaneous and steady depressing of the larynx may be at odds with that goal. Steven Plank’s modern book on choral performance practice speaks of the value of Maffei’s fioratura: The articulation of early vocal music presents challenges to the modern singer, steeped in a technique that features depressed larynx, large air column and a general slurring of notes for the sake of maximum uniformity and volume of tone… In particular, the challenges take form in the need for increased verbalism and glottal articulation. Giovanni Camillo Maffei, an Italian physician and musician, notes in 1562 that rapid passage-work was articulated in the throat, when he defines voce passagiata as ‘a sound caused by 34 Franchinus Gaffurius, Practica musicae, Book Three, 1496, trans. Irwin Young (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 160. Giambattista Mancini, Practical Reflections on Figured Singing: Editions of 1774 and 1777, trans. Edward Forman (Champaign, IL: Pro Musica Press, 1967), 29. 22 minute and ordered repercussions of air in the throat with the intention of pleasing the ear. 35 As we have seen, it is clear that if singers today use only a depressed larynx (a matter discussed further in Ch. 4) their voices will lack agility, and also be artistically limited. Most voice students in formal education settings are required to participate in choral groups in which their individual vocal techniques may be challenged. Plank’s paragraph highlights a pedagogy that withholds relevant vocal issues and ideas of the past from modern students. A one-dimensional pedagogy neglects to prepare them mentally or technically for the variables inherent in earlier choral literature such as Maffei’s agile sixteenth-note divisions. In a recent study, James Stark explored Maffei’s articulation requirements and proposed that, at the time of Caccini and Maffei, “there were two parallel modes of vocal production, anterior and full-glottal, and that most highly trained singers possibly used a combination of the two methods.” 36 He illustrated two types of glottal closure that may have been used in the early Baroque: full glottal closure and anterior closure. In figure 9 below, the glottis is seen from above. In the left image, 1 is the thyroid cartilage, 2 is the arytenoid cartilages, the tips of which are called the vocal processes. The processes are two- fifths of the way into the vocal ligament. In the right image, when the arytenoids are firmly 35 Steven Plank, “Articulation, Ornamentation and Interpretation,” in Choral Performance, (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 81. 36 Timothy Robson, “The Second Symposium on Early Vocal Practices Case Western Reserve University 29–31 October, 1982” The Journal of Musicology, 2, No. 1 (Winter, 1983), 98–102. 23 closed, the aperture of the glottis, hence the vibrating portion, is shorter than when all five- fifths are open. 37 Figure 9. View of glottis from above showing two possible sizes of aperture. From James Stark, Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 9. Since Stark gave his conference paper in 1982, the idea does not seem to have gained traction among students of historical performance practices, or there is not enough interest in the particular repertoire to generate much experimentation in multiple mechanisms. In my own studies, I am exploring breath-pressure techniques for more and less articulation when singing divisions. Regardless of the type of closure applied to the vocal folds, the folds are still subject to the altitude of the larynx. Maffei’s opinions on laryngeal height can only be inferred. His descriptions of the anatomy include discussion of the larynx, but his pedagogical language is in early stages of development and so uses holistic terms that are vague to us. The following chapters look at later treatises in which the singers’ specialized vocabulary is more developed. There is a faulty premise at work in the issue of laryngeal height, which, when understood, will cast more light on Maffei’s discorso. 37 James Stark, Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 8. 24 CHAPTER 3 BÉRARD’S MOVEABLE LARYNX Jean-Antoine Bérard’s L’Art du chant (1755) has the most explicit descriptions of laryngeal movement to be found in early writings on singing. 38 This treatise challenged me to redefine my received wisdom on laryngeal height as it pertains to professional vocal production. Bérard was not an amateur singer, so he must have had no difficulty projecting his voice artistically; consequently, we may infer that the “movement” he referred to is modest relative to a stable position. However, Bérard boldly insisted that the larynx moved up and down with pitch — the very thing singers today are taught to overcome. I posit that the certitude with which he draws on his era’s scientific terminology obfuscates what would otherwise be familiar vocal technique to a modern reader. It is my contention that it is the modern received wisdom about a low, stationary larynx that causes us to view Bérard as radically at odds with modern technique and therefore wrong. Jean-Antoine Bérard was an haute-contre at the Paris Opera in the early decades of the eighteenth century. 39 He was cast in Rameau’s debut opera Hippolyte et Aricie, in 1733, as one of Les Trois Parques. Bérard documented the ornamentation practices of Rameau’s operas and vocal works in L’Art du chant, and writes passionately about the need for vocal color and the artist’s obligation to have nuanced enunciation. He is a primary source for 38 Jean-Antoine Bérard, L’Art du chant (Paris: Dessaint & Saillant, 1755). 39 The haute-contre voice was the highest of male tenor voices at the time, but it is worth mentioning that French performing pitch is thought to have been considerably lower than today’s A=440. Mary Cyr tells us the ton d”Opera in the early eighteenth century was approximately 392 Hz. Mary Cyr, Style and Performance for Bowed String Instruments in French Baroque Music (Farnham, Surrey, GBR: Ashgate Publishing Group, 2012), 142. Accessed May 25, 2015. ProQuest ebrary. 25 students of Rameau’s performance practice, yet he is not often used as a source for historical vocal pedagogy for reasons this chapter will make clear. Bérard’s knowledge of anatomy comes from contemporary anatomist Antoine Ferrein (1693–1769), who published over a dozen books on anatomy, notably De la formation de la voix de l’homme (1741). He coined the term cordes vocales, which stayed in use until recently, when “vocal folds” was deemed to be more accurate. In his fourth chapter, “De la formation de la voix” (paying homage to Ferrein), Bérard explains to the reader how sounds are made: It is easy to proceed now to the production of sounds. One can predict already that to form high sounds, it will be necessary to make the larynx rise; that to form a sound six times higher than another, the larynx must raise itself by six degrees 40 —by six lines, for example; that to form a sound a half-degree higher, the larynx must be made to rise by a half-line. It is understandable that because of the inverse reason, the larynx must be made to descend for low sounds, and the degrees of lowering are in exactly the same proportions as the degrees of elevation in high sounds. (One can convince oneself of the truth and exactitude of these proportions by placing a finger on the larynx when making high and low sounds) 41 [Il est aisé de procéder maintenant à la génération des Sons: on devine déja que pour former des Sons aigus, il faut faire monter le Larinx, que pour rendre un Son six fois plus aigu qu’un autre, le Larinx doit s’élever de six degrés, de six lignes par exemple, que pour former un Son plus aigu d’un demi dégré, if faut faire monter le Larinx d’une demi-ligne; on comprend que par la raison des contraires, il faut faire descendre le Larinx pour les Sons graves & que les degrés d’abaissement sont exactement dans les mêmes proportions, que les degrés d’élevation dans les Sons aigus. (On peut se convaincre de la vérité & de l’éxactitude de ces proportions, en portant le doigt sur le Larinx, lorsqu’on rend des Sons aigus ou graves.)] 40 “Degrés” in Cotgrave’s Dictionary may mean “stair, step; also meane [sic], or way unto a thing.” Some interpret “steps” as tonal whole steps. Bérard is inconsistent with his use of the word degrés. 41 The end of this passage is formatted as a footnote in Bérard but here is in parentheses. From Sidney Murray, “Jean-Baptiste Bérard’s L' Art du chant: Translation and Commentary” (Ph.D. diss., The University of Iowa, 1965), 85; Bérard, 20–21. 26 Today, we are taught not to raise the larynx with pitch at all, so it is alarming to think of raising the larynx “six times higher” for ascending pitch. While it is easy to jump to conclusions, we do not know what he means by degrés or lignes. Do degrés or lignes refer to the lines of the musical staff (literal whole tones), or some unseen calibrating device? Perhaps the degrés or lignes are not fixed increments, as he does speak of proportion. If we remember that the modern larynx does, in fact, move by degrees within a stable range, then we might consider that Bérard is simply sensitive to the slightest movement of his own larynx. Still, we cannot conclude anything from one paragraph. Bérard sometimes uses the term “insensible degrees,” further mystifying how much actual movement he means. The amount of movement is less alarming when Bérard discusses laryngeal movement as corrective advice for too much force in the male voice: The vocal cords can be too stretched in certain people and then the sounds are too sharp, [and] will be a bit sour. One should make the larynx climb a little by insensible degrees, and then the vocal cords are pulled less tight and the sounds are less acute. When it is a question of forming lower sounds, one must make the larynx descend because then the vocal cords are more slack and consequently lower. 42 [Les cordes vocales peuvent être trop tendues dans certains sujets, & alors les Sons pour être trop aigus, seront un peu aigres. On doit alors faire monter le Larinx par degrés insensibles; & ainsi les rubans sonores seront moins aigus. Quand il est question de former des Sons graves, il faut bien descendre le Larinx, parce qu’alors les rubans sonores seront plus relâchés, & par conséquent les Sons plus graves.] As a corrective plan, the advice is on par with today’s pedagogy. This use of degrees is a rational solution by today’s understanding, which makes me believe Bérard was aware of a neutral laryngeal position whence adjustments are made. It is also possible he may have 42 Bérard, 39, translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 27 seen his thyroid notch rise and descend because the thyroid cartilage was merely tipping or rocking on its synovial joint, creating the illusion of traveling distance. In his fifth chapter, “Génération des Sons primitifs de la Voix, & leur liason entr’eux,” Bérard discusses how the larynx raises and lowers high and low notes respectively in proportion to the force of air coming from the lungs. He says that the larynx is responsible for the pitch. Surprisingly, he acknowledges another way is possible: It is not beside the point to note that what I have said on the generation of high and low sounds ought not be taken with strict severity, for [with] the larynx remaining stationary, one could absolutely render successively the high and low sounds: one would only need to move the lips forward, then back toward the teeth, and to continue this play [of movement]: we see that in all these various cases the jaw should be considered as a cord that is sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, but because it almost never happens in singing that one takes away the freedom of the larynx to move up or down, one should take no account of this exception to the rule. 43 [Il n’est pas hors de propos d’observer que ce que j’ai dit sur la génération des Sons aigus & des Sons graves ne doit point être pris dans une rigueur géométrique; car le Larinx demeurant immobile, on pourroit absolument rendre successivement des Sons aigus & et des Sons graves; il n’y auroit pour cela qu’à advancer les lévres, les ramener ensuite vers les dents, & qu’à continuer ce jeu: on voit que dans ces différens cas la Mâchoire devroit être considerée comme une corde tantôt plus, tantôt moins longue; mais parce qu’il n’arrive presque jamais dans le Chant qu’on ôte au Larinx la liberté de monter ou de descendre, on ne doit tenir nul compte de cette exception à la régle.] After all the talk of laryngeal movement, he tells us that it is possible to sing another way: with an “immobile” larynx. The pitches can still be changed because the articulators (jaw and lips specifically) can make the necessary adjustments to the vocal tract, thereby compensating for the still larynx. Though he knows it is possible to sing both ways, Bérard 43 Ibid, 22-23. 28 prefers laryngeal movement to an immobile larynx, presumably because he requires the sensation of access to his vocal color palette. Bérard had a set of four basic vocal colors: hard, soft, shadowed, and bright, to be used in combinations. 44 Bérard valued effective pronunciation of text in the appropriate vocal color for a particular affect. These two things – the word and its dramatic color – were bound together. L’Art du chant is full of directives for sophisticated, nuanced, and affective vocal emission. Bérard has included musical examples for majestic, violent, muffled, halting, tender, light, and mannered sounds, with instructions for air speed and dramatic impetus (see figure 10, page 35). Bérard and his fellow artists may have eschewed this static-larynx technique because they wanted access to nuanced shades of vocal color, something one could not achieve with a single laryngeal position. If we believe that a lower-than-neutral laryngeal position, a position that is steady, is the (only) correct way to sing today, then do we conclude that Bérard’s treatise must be evidence that the vocal technique of the past was somehow inferior or wrong? Richard Wistreich ponders this question in an essay on early singing techniques. He sees Bérard as representative of all singing techniques before 1800. The technique by which singers can greatly increase the volume of the voice and carry the full chest voice higher still (at the expense of flexibility of articulation) by depressing the larynx was a development of the late 44 In his Baroque Music textbook, John Walter Hill discusses the Affektenlehre and shows a square chart with a fundamental affect in each corner representing the extremes of love, sadness, anger and joy. If one imagines a spiral inside the square, then imagine any given point on the spiral would be a particular combination of emotions and intensity. Hill cites Marpurg as describing how vocal color corresponds to this chart: “jealousy, an affect created out of love, hate and envy, is introduced by a change from a wavering and rather soft tone, to a very intense, daring and scolding tone and again to a moving and sighing tone, while alternating between very slow and very quick movement.” I hope to pursue this apparent correlation between affect charts and vocal pedagogy in the future. John Walter Hill, Baroque Music (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 392. 29 eighteenth century, first described in a treatise by Manuel García [Jr.] in 1847. It is thought provoking that before the time of Rossini singers raised the larynx as the tone became higher — as rock, soul and folk singers do now — rather than consciously lowering it, as in modern classical technique. Marin Mersenne (1636), in an exhaustive investigation of the function of the human voice, states unequivocally that “the larynx rises when we sing the Dessus… the larynx goes down when singing the Basse.” 45 This is in essence repeated more than a century later by Jean-Antoine Bérard (1755) who, in a mechanistic attempt to explain the way in which the voice changes pitches in the same way as stringed instruments, advises a student to place a finger on the larynx and to note how it rises by steps as the sung notes get higher. However scientifically wrong his theory, the experiment demonstrates for us precisely the vocal technique of an eighteenth-century professional singer and teacher and reiterates Mersenne’s own observation. 46 Interestingly, Wistreich refers to the depressed-larynx technique as having emerged in the late eighteenth century, but Bérard seems to have been aware of it (the stationary larynx mentioned above) as early as the mid-eighteenth century. But, by calling out Bérard’s “wrong” science, by taking his words at face value regarding laryngeal height and pitch, and by disregarding that today we know that there is movement of the larynx within a stable range, we may be creating too wide a chasm between ourselves and the past. Bérard is difficult to interpret, but it is the received wisdom on the meaning of the lower larynx that should be scrutinized. 45 Marin Mersenne, Harmoie Universelle (1636), Traitez de la voix et des chants; Livre 1 er , Proposition IV. These two unequivocal statements occur in a paragraph describing the interplay of laryngeal muscles with the cartilages that adjust the vocal folds to be able to make not merely different pitches, but also contrasting qualities of sounds: weak and strong, smooth and rough, high and low, (faible & forte, clairee & raugue, grave & aigue). 46 Richard Wistreich, “Reconstructing Pre-Romantic Singing Technique” in The Cambridge Companion to Singing, ed. John Potter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 178. 30 Wistreich appears to be saying that the depressed or lowered larynx is better (superior?), at least for achieving volume. Wistreich does not appear to consider that Bérard’s laryngeal movement may have taken place within a stable range, or that volume of tone is achievable from a non-lowered position. In the above excerpt, Wistreich does not mention any modern-day pedagogues, who all agree the neutral position is preferable to the low, stationary one. This is the issue that students of Historically Informed Performance Practice will often encounter – that the “depressed larynx” is associated with modern and good vocal technique, and one that is any other way is bad (the origins of this modern way are discussed in Chapter 4). It seems unlikely that the vocal art music before the nineteenth century sounded entirely like rock, pop, and folk singers do now (some of it may have), because performers needed to project their voices in venues that were not only large, but also filled with sound- absorbing fabrics. Just as they do today, singers would have discovered how to exploit the resonating capacities of their vocal tracts in order to fill performing venues. I believe they achieved sounds we would recognize but that they were comparatively limited in their word choices to explain what or how they studied a craft generally transmitted via imitation. In another context, Wistreich refers to Marin Mersenne (1588-1648) to give us a reliable source for the idea of a larynx that rises and falls as pitch rises and falls. Mersenne was neither a singer nor a musician, but a Jesuit priest and savant who lent his considerable intellect to creative issues of his day. Indeed, Mersenne’s Harmonie Universelle is so grand and thorough a work that it could be considered definitive or representative of collective knowledge. Regarding the voice, Mersenne had good knowledge of the intrinsic and 31 extrinsic laryngeal muscles as well as of the nerves and their connections to organs and tissues. Mersenne’s description of the larynx is like Maffei’s, offering a holistic view of the vocal complex. However, Wistreich brings in Mersenne to cement his point that even the most esteemed scholars of the day were misguided regarding the larynx. Mersenne was not wrong about the larynx. 47 And neither is Wistreich. Each author is writing from a particular cultural vantage point worth understanding. It is no accident that Wistreich uses the adjective “mechanistic” in his paragraph to describe Bérard’s language. The universe, according to seventeenth- and eighteenth- century science, was mechanical or describable in mechanical terms. Since the late seventeenth century, machinery had become a feature (often the feature) of theatrical productions with which Bérard would undoubtedly have been familiar. In Paris in 1738, the inventor Jacques de Vaucanson had a wildly popular exhibit that displayed a mechanical flute player and defecating duck. 48 The exhibit earned Vaucanson a prestigious spot in Paris’s Académie des Sciences (Ferrein joined in 1742). Jessica Riskin recounts that the show was extremely well attended in spite of a steep ticket price. It is highly likely that Bérard resided in Paris during this time, but I have no way of proving that he saw Vaucanson’s exhibit. But Bérard did use the French word automate in a paragraph in which he “supposes” an artist or inventor could make a mechanical copy of a larynx and lungs 47 I would note that “true” or “correct” science is not a pre-requisite for learning to sing. Many singers and teachers prefer imagery over science and are entirely successful. 48 Jessica Riskin, “The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life,” Critical Inquiry, 29 (2003): 599–633. 32 and put then inside a statue. 49 Surely, Bérard used mechanistic language because he had been educated in a culture that valued it and also because he thought of himself as learned and au courant. Bérard’s social and professional circles would have accepted mechanical principles and fashioned their understanding of voice around the idea of a moving larynx even if their actual laryngeal movements were subtle. In his 1966 dissertation on Bérard, Sidney Murray asks his reader not to judge negatively the laryngeal references, because the reputable Friedrich S. Brodnitz says “A certain amount of laryngeal movement is found in normal phonation” 50 Murray appears to believe, and I concur, that Bérard’s voice would have been aesthetically recognizable to modern audiences. And while it may have been aesthetically or technically recognizable, it must have been stylistically very different, as is evinced by the range of colors Bérard described. Ultimately we are curious to know what Bérard, his pupils and his singing colleagues sounded like. There are some accounts of how his colleagues’ voices may have been received, but nothing of Bérard himself or his students. Mary Cyr has written several articles about the singers of Rameau’s operas, compiling first-hand accounts of audience members who described their aural experiences. Cyr has observed that audiences were in tune with the differences between the French and visiting Italian singers’ style at the time. 51 49 Bérard, 46. 50 Murray, 33. 51 Mary Cyr, “Eighteenth-Century French and Italian Singing: Rameau’s Writing for the Voice.” Music & Letters, 61 (1980): 318–37. Paris had one main opera house in the 1720s and ‘30s that 33 She cites De Brosses: Italian women’s voices are also of a similar type to those of the castrati: light and flexible to the last degree; in a word, they have the same character as their music. Don’t ask fullness [la rondeur] of them: they don’t know what it is; don’t speak to them about those admirable sounds of our French music: swelled, sustained, swelled again and diminished by degree, on a single note; they would no more be capable of understanding you than of performing such sounds. 52 Bérard would have exemplified the French sound in his performing as well as his pedagogy. Rondeur, the adjective used by De Brosses, distinguishes the French sound in a way that can only be a product of the French language and one which Bérard is keen to preserve. Bérard repeats many things about French pronunciation that were said by Bacilly in the seventeenth century. Bacilly spoke of a desirable vocal tone that “nourishes” the ear. 53 If a larynx is higher than neutral, in a “wrong” position, then the voice is likely neither to produce a fullness of tone that nourishes the ear, nor have access to a wardrobe of affective colors. The French language, as was noted by both Bérard and Bacilly, does not share the typical long-short, long-short rhythm of Italian; it has, in singing terms, a more sustained gait. Both pedagogues spend much of their ink on the pronunciation of vowels and vowel combinations. Today, we work with vowels to tune formants, which create fullness of featured French artists, but one could also hear Italian singers at the Concert Sprituel and in private homes.!! 52 Cyr, 323. 53 Bacilly, Traité de la méthode ou art de bien chanter par le moyen duquel on peut en peu de temps se perfectionner dans cet art, & qui comprend toutes les remarques curieuses que l’on peut faire (Paris: G. de Luyne, 1671). 256. A Commentary upon the Art of Singing: Remarques curiueses sur l’art de bien chanter. 1668, trans. and ed. Austin B. Caswell (New York: Institute of Medieval Music, 1968), 23. 34 sound and enhance projection. 54 Perhaps this is what Bérard and Bacilly were doing. Formant tuning can also create inertive reactance, which is achieved when a non-rigid larynx adjusts to the pharynx and the articulators around certain vowels. 55 Thus a larynx that moved up and down might still be involved in a vocal tract that created a full sound. It seems likely that these acoustic phenomena were known but were communicated by non- scientific, even poetic language, leaving us to infer their presence. But then again, the distinction between French and Italian vocal color may exist because the two laryngeal techniques were emerging side by side. Cyr observes: As for the mysterious ‘fullness’ that Italian voices lacked, perhaps De Brosses was referring to an even tone cultivated by Italian singers with little if any change of colour between the registers; the range demanded by most French music, on the contrary, was less great and permitted changes of color between registers combined with these delicately nuanced sounds. Though perhaps not exclusive to French music, these subtle dynamic inflections, closely bound up with the language and the sentiment expressed, were among the demands the French style of singing imposed. 56 Cyr’s observation echoes what Bérard advocated – “subtle dynamic inflections, closely bound up with the language” – and may explain why he rejected the immobile larynx, 54 For more on formant tuning see Maribeth Bunch-Dayme Dynamics of the Singing Voice, 5th ed. (Vienna-New York: Springer Verlag, 2009) and Ralph Appelman The Science of Vocal Pedagogy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967). 55 Inertive reactance is explained by Ingo Titze: “The vocal tract can store acoustic energy in one part of the vibration cycle and feed it back to the source at another, more advantageous time. In effect, the vocal tract gives a ‘kick’ to each cycle of oscillation of the vocal folds so as to increase the amplitude of vibratory motions. In analogy to pushing someone on a playground swing, this cyclic kick resembles a carefully timed push to boost the amplitude (travel distance) of the swing's oscillations... A singer's task is to adjust the shape of the vocal tract (by carefully selecting favorable “singing” vowels) so that inertive reactance is experienced over most of the pitch range—no easy task.” See “The Human Instrument,” Scientific American 298, no.1 (January 2008): 94–101. 56 Cyr, 324. 35 which may have prevented him from accessing the artistic expression of the French language. We cannot verify Bérard’s pedagogical results, but we can read his pedagogy. Below is his directive for Majestic Sounds: Figure 10. Bérard’s directions for articulation and pronunciation. 57 Observe how the size of Bérard’s text depicts for the singer how much force (air) to use, and when to emphasize the sound of the consonant. He explains how the way of engaging 57 Bérard, page 1 of musical examples. [For Majestic Sounds: Render the air-flow in such a way that the sound grows with each note, Blend a certain degree of darkness and slowness into your articulation and pronunciation.] I have chosen not to elaborate on Bérard’s ornamentation in this thesis, but the markings are present in this example above the notes he recommends that the singer ornament. 36 the air-flow should build the majestic attitude along with specific vocal color choices. Today’s leading pedagogues have said, though from a more circumspect place than Bérard, that the larynx does move within a stable range. Taken with the whole of his pedagogy (breathing, onset, elocution, color), Bérard’s flexible larynx may make sense, especially in view of his era’s fashion for mechanistic language. I must conclude that Wistreich’s paragraph, while it represents a common opinion, is misleading in the certainty with which is declares a divide between singers today and singers of Bérard’s time. Bérard’s pedagogy is only alarming if we accept the modern notion that singing with a low and stationary larynx is the only correct way to sing. 37 CHAPTER 4 GARCÍA’S DESCRIPTION OF VOIX CLAIRE AND VOIX SOMBRE Manuel García Jr. (1805–1906) is generally considered to be the father of modern vocal pedagogy. 58 He had a very long, successful career teaching some of the finest singers of the nineteenth century: Julius Stockhausen, Jenny Lind, Mathilde Marchesi, Jessie Bond and of course, his sisters Pauline Viardot and Maria Malibran. His pupils premiered many of the roles that remain in today’s standard operatic repertoire. García’s students are associated with a golden age of singing, which is why he is looked to as a resource for old methods that worked. García’s military service treating neck wounds led him to the medical knowledge that greatly enhanced his understanding of the vocal mechanism in the new post-Galenic language of modern science. He is credited with the invention of the laryngoscope. Also influential was the failure of his own voice in his early twenties. 59 Interestingly, García’s writings captured, in more modern vocal-pedagogy terms, the nuts and bolts of the difference between the moveable larynx technique and the low, stationary technique. The story of the pedagogical transition away from the former to the latter is told in the careers of Adolphe Nourrit and Gilles Duprez, later in this chapter. 58 “García was one of those seminal historical figures whose career marked a watershed between the past and the future. . . although more then 150 years have passed since his first treatises appeared, he remains a presence that must be reckoned with in any serious study of the history and technique of singing.” See James Stark, Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 3. 59 Donald Paschke says the damage was done on tour when Manuel Jr. (baritone) covered his father’s tenor roles. See Manuel García II, A Complete Treatise on the Art of Singing: Part One, trans. Donald Paschke (New York; Da Capo Press, 1982), v. 38 Even though García’s language is closer to that of modern pedagogy than the language of Bérard, we still can expect some trouble deciphering the precise meaning of his words. García borrowed from science to augment an established singer’s pedagogical language, which is famously mysterious to outsiders and the cause of misunderstandings. 60 García Jr. learned about singing from his father, Manuel García Sr. (1775–1832), whose own pedagogical lineage stretched back to Nicola Porpora, the teacher of Farinelli. 61 Manuel Sr. was himself a successful tenor and teacher who taught his craft to his children. His older school of pedagogy valued vocal individuality, agility, and improvisational skills. 62 These skills become rare among singers as the low larynx gained prominence. Laryngeal height, in García’s treatise, is linked to the production of the basic timbres: the voix claire and the voix sombre. 63 García explains that “We call timbre the peculiar and infinitely variable character which each register, each tone, can take, an abstraction made from the intensity.” 64 He elaborates on how every component of the vocal mechanism works together with the others to manifest the sound a singer intends to make. 60 See Stark for the consequences of the scientific community’s interpretation of García’a coup de glotte. 61 Porpora never wrote on vocal pedagogy. The only student of Porpora to write was Domenico Corri (1746-1825), who published The Singer's Preceptor in English in London in 1810. See James Radomski, Manuel García (1775–1832): The Life of a bel canto Tenor at the Dawn of Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 270. 62 See Radomski, Chapter 12. 63 The treatise was presented to the Académie des Sciences in 1840, published in 1841 and again in 1872. See A Complete Treatise on the Art of Singing, trans. by Donald V. Paschke. 2 vols., vol. 1. (New York: Da Capo Press, Inc.), 1984. 64 García, A Complete Treatise on the Art of Singing: Part One, 1. 39 García taught his singers to build layers of capacity that could be either reduced to or built up from the two basic timbres produced by two available mechanisms (see figure 11). As is common in translations from French to English, various options exist for translating voix claire and voix sombre. Meant to convey opposites, the terms may be translated as vocal sounds that are light or dark, bright or dull, clear or cloudy, open or closed. The words “open” and “closed” may imply actions or resultant qualities, which matter because different words trigger different muscles in different students. Such linguistic variation is essential in the studio, where the mysterious (lawless) language of pedagogy thrives, but it undermines scholarly attempts to level a linguistic playing field. Nevertheless, the fundamental laryngeal issues will be apparent in the two contrasting timbres. Toward the end of García’s career, he wrote Hints on Singing, in which his instructional priorities had evolved to reflect his many decades of teaching experience. 65 Hints offers us a diagram of the two positions (see figure 11). Figure 11. Larynx and palate during voix claire and voix sombre positions. From Manuel García Jr.’s Hints on Singing, trans. Beata García (London; Ascherberg, Hopwood & Crew Ltd., 1894), 11. 65 Hints on Singing, trans. Beata García (London; Ascherberg, Hopwood & Crew Ltd., 1894). 40 The throat in the claire position retains a substantial passageway although it is narrower than that of the sombre position. Because the soft palate lowers as the larynx rises, the claire larynx appears in a neutral position, or possibly one slightly higher than neutral, while the velum appears lowered, which would allow air into the nasal cavity (resulting in nasal resonance). Notice that in the sombre position, the velum, or soft palate, is higher than it is in the claire. Singers would have practiced these timbres in both their head and chest registers. Of the voix claire and voix sombre García exlains: It is not at all doubtful, after our observations, that shapes, the diameters, the tension of the walls, the various lengths which the vocal tube assumes are indispensable for the production of the timbers. These conditions are themselves determined: first by the different positions of the larynx; second by corresponding movements of the velum. 66 Laryngeal height, therefore, affects the whole tract. 67 We can see the substantial difference in the shape of the vocal tract in figure 11, which means the difference of resultant vocal color between the two positions should be marked. Between the two extremes, a range of variable colors would be available. García explains that the larynx remains fixed in the dark timbre as pitch ascends, but in the clear timbre, the larynx rises “gradually” as pitch ascends. 68 García is the first to discuss the “indispensable” contribution of the “tube,” or 66 Paschke, 1iv. 67 “Independent wave reflections, and therefore resonant frequencies, are created each time the relative diameter of the vocal tract changes.” See McCoy, 36. 68 Paschke, xxix–xxxi. 41 pharynx. The resultant timbre is a product of the entire tube, whose bottom edge is the glottis (in the larynx). The larynx must, therefore, yield to the demands of the tube. The claire and sombre timbres, he explains, can each be produced in either chest or head register. 69 García talks about using the timbres in each register for various vocal qualities. Voix claire and voix sombre produced in both the TA-dominant register and the CT-dominant register make a base of four colors from which the singer can choose and blend for artistic effect. García states that the clear timbre in chest voice adds “luster and brilliance,” however, taken to extremes, it can render a voice “shrill and yelping.” 70 In the same register this timbre gives: . . . some penetration and roundness to the tone. It is with the aid of this timbre that the singer can communicate to his voice all the volume of which it is capable (notice that I speak of volume and not of strength [force] or brilliance [éclat]). This timbre carried to excess covers the tones, stifles them, makes them muffled and raucous. 71 Apparently, the clear timbre had carrying power, but the singer must learn how far is too far, how much is too much. And it appears that these varying mechanisms were to be employed interchangeably during performance. García has reduced the artist’s whole range of possibilities to four core timbres. This idea of four core timbres, interestingly, is no longer present in current pedagogy. 69 For the sake of simplicity, and also because I like it, I will stick to a two-register model. García uses three: chest, falsetto and head. 70 Ibid., 1ii 71 Ibid., 1ii 42 Roger Freitas uncovered this conundrum while doing research on Verdi’s “tastes in vocal style.” 72 He observes that Verdi composed for singers who ostensibly had a broader spectrum of individual traits than is heard in today’s opera houses. Freitas turns to García’s treatise and finds the four core timbres. Of the definition of the voix claire he says that “to anyone trained in modern vocal pedagogy, this approach must appear startling.” 73 He continues: In seemingly every modern discussion, the only approved position of the vocal mechanism, for all vocalism, is similar to García’s dark tone: for a singer to adopt a high larynx and a low soft palate, particularly accompanying a rise in pitch, would be considered a serious, even dangerous fault. . . Of course, García’s instructions for the clear technique would yield a bright and, to our ears, probably somewhat shallow and nasal tone. 74 Here Freitas articulates the received wisdom that anyone training in modern pedagogy will be startled by the idea of a non-lowered larynx, and assumes that García’s voix claire will be found artistically unappealing today. He laments that we sing in only “one way” today, with “the only approved position,” whereas García had taught his pupils four “ways” in four timbral modes that interacted dynamically with each other. Of the four core timbres, we appear to have only retained the voix sombre in chest register position for all our artistic choices. The remaining three timbres heard their death knell when, in 1837, Gilbert-Louis Duprez dazzled audiences in the role of Arnold in 72 Roger Freitas, “Toward a Verdian Ideal of Singing: Emancipation from Modern Orthodoxy,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 127, No. 2 (2002), 226–57. 73 Freitas, 233. 74 Ibid. 43 Rossini’s Guillaume Tell by singing a high C in the voix sombre position. Once audiences heard it, they wanted more, sending singers and their teachers to work. Duprez replaced Adolphe Nourrit, who had been Paris’s reigning tenor in the 1830’s. Nourrit, a student of García Sr., represented the traditional French aesthetic at the time, which used the voix claire position to sing high notes. Nourrit may be the first singer for whom there is a recorded account of an attempt to change fach mid-career. When Nourrit lost half his contracted roles to Duprez, he attempted to re-fashion his already successful technique. It seemed like a mere mechanical change to Nourrit, but his letters tell us the sad story of the unsuccessful attempt. 75 As a consequence of my stay in Naples, my old voice was no longer at my disposal, and with my new studies my mixed voice and head voice vanished. I was so displeased with my artificial accents that I was determined to make no use of them. 76 . . . I am French . . . To tell the truth, with the Italian inflection that I have cultivated, I have only one color at my disposal, and I find myself falling into precisely those errors for which we reproach the Italians. I have sinned through an excess of humility. I deny my gods, and I am punished. 77 He committed suicide when his voice failed to adapt to the “new” vocal production. Scholars of Nourrit’s correspondence conclude that he also suffered from ill health, which likely contributed to his vocal issues and subsequent emotional anguish relating to his career. 75 See Henry Pleasants The Great Tenor Tragedy: The Last Days of Adolphe Nourrit, trans. Henry and Richard Pleasants (Portland, OR; Amadeus Press, 1995). 76 This letter was written to Eugène Duverger (his brother-in-law) in 1838. Ibid., 75. 77 Ibid., 77.! 44 In his doctoral dissertation, Jason C. Vest draws on accounts of opera lovers who heard Nourrit: while some understood and adored his decidedly French sound, others were less appreciative. 78 Nourrit’s high notes may have been produced in the head voice or a type of voix mixe (a blend of chest and head registers presumably in the voix claire position), which helped his high notes carry. In any case, this vocal technique and resultant sound appear to have gone extinct with startling speed. Duprez, meanwhile, enjoyed a good career and was much loved by French audiences, though he was said to have had vocal problems throughout his career as a result of the physical strain of this new “technique.” 79 In a recent article Gregory Bloch discusses the opinions of García’s contemporaries, Paul Diday and Joseph Pétrequin, two doctors specializing in voice who were in competition with García, but were not themselves singers or teachers. Diday and Pétrequin thought the technique was “revolutionary” yet “pathological” and could never last. 80 Regarding the new technique, Bloch warns the reader that many accounts of Duprez and Nourrit have “been mythologized and re-mythologized” and that good story-telling may have obscured historical facts. 81 Bloch also asserts that Duprez was likely not the first tenor to sing a chest-voice high C, that this way of singing top C had been around some time. 78 Jason C. Vest, “Adolphe Nourrit, Gilbet-Louis Duprez, and Transformation of Tenor Technique in the Early Nineteenth Century: Historical and Physiological Considerations,” (University of Kentucky, 2009), 26. 79 Gregory Bloch, “The Pathological Voice of Gilbert-Louis Duprez” Cambridge Opera Journal, 19, No. 1, (Mar., 2007), 11–33. 80 Ibid,15. 81 Ibid,12. 45 Bloch shows the shift toward the low stable larynx as the only position in vocal pedagogy in writings by two authors 67 years apart. The first is Francesco Bennati’s Mémoire sur un cas particulier d’anomalie de la voix humaine pendant le chant (1833), which shows that in 1833 specialists agreed that the larynx moved up and down with changes in pitch: Up until now scientists specializing in the vocal organ, if they have not been able to agree on the quality of the instrument, have at least agreed on the mechanism for emitting high and low tones. They have consequently said that when one sings, the larynx raises itself up and narrows itself for high notes, and that the opposite happens during the emission of low notes. 82 The second, Frederick James Crowest’s Advice to Singers: By a Singer (1900), shows a new emphasis of the lowered larynx position: Position of the Larynx. — The larynx, or upper part of the wind-pipe, plays a most important part in singing. Upon it depends all the beauty, and quality, and richness of the voice. The singer will do well to constantly think about the larynx, to watch it, to feel that it is well down below the mouth before commencing the first note of a song, which note must, under such circumstances, be rich, round, and penetrating. Then the larynx must never be allowed to rise above this fixed point. It may be deepened, and must be, for the higher notes, but it must never ascend, or nearly approach the roof of the mouth, or the sound-passage is closed, and the sounds become at once impure, vitiated, and without body or foundation. 83 Not only did the “pathological” technique endure, it became a large part of today’s received tradition that it is the “only safe” way to produce an appropriate sound. Bloch’s article is an excellent complement to most lore on Duprez because he has gathered 82 Francesco Bennati, “Mémoire sur un cas particulier d’anomalie de la voix humaine pendant le chant,” read at the Académie Royale des Sciences, 30 September 1833; also published in an offprint edition (Paris, 1834); cited in Bloch, 16. 83 Crowest. Advice to Singers: By a Singer (New York: Frederick Warne and Co., 1904). http://www.gutenberg.org/files/41013/41013-h/41013-h.htm 46 information from relevant peripheral sources for a wider perspective on this artistic experience. His conclusion is relevant to my thesis when he says: Diday and Pétrequin called Duprez revolutionary because he seemed to challenge the facts of vocal production as they were then known. We have come to imagine him as revolutionary because we have forgotten that any other conception of singing was ever possible. 84 It is in this state of forgetfulness that we might make hasty judgments of earlier vocal pedagogies. Freitas remarks that García “in some ways unites the nineteenth century to the eighteenth. 85 He was, via his father’s teaching, a product of the eighteenth century yet he rode the wave of aesthetic change that rolled through the nineteenth. So, while García did document the role of laryngeal height for the Académie des Sciences, he was not himself a proponent of the singular voix sombre position. The incongruity is, of course, that according to today’s pedagogy, the larynx does move within a stable range, ostensibly allowing a modern artist access to at least a portion of the four-timbre palette. 84 Bloch, 3. 85 Freitas, 229. 47 CONCLUSION A recurring theme in vocal history is the decline if good singing, and the loss of secrets of the Old Italian School. But this may only be a cyclical reaction to the mutations of bel canto, as singers met the challenges of new musical styles by modifying their technique rather than abandoning its essential components. These essential components are still the backbone of operatic singing, as many great singers continue old traditions. 86 James Stark – Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy It is beyond the scope of this thesis to cover all of the issues that befell vocal pedagogy in the post-García decades. In brief, the post-García years saw doctors invade the vocal pedagogy landscape with ideas for “safe” and “natural” vocal production, which proved to be neither. However, the low-larynx technique, also in the guise of the open- throat technique, endured amid the misinformation resulting from the clash of doctors’ and singers’ jargon. Cornelius Reid, writing in the mid-twentieth century, believed that a return to the old masters and ancient tradition was the cure for what ailed vocal pedagogy in the first half of the twentieth century. 87 Reid and his teacher Estelle Liebling (1880- 1970), who taught Beverly Sills, were bright lights in the messy years of strange methods after García passed away in 1906 and before Vennard did his ground-breaking work in the late 1960s. The work of William Vennard reintroduced a new and better field of voice science (with more refined measuring equipment than García’s). Science can only ever be a complement to vocal exercises and imagery, but I believe it can be enormously helpful in explaining why the old exercises work. It can also build a semantic realm of common 86 Stark, xxv. 87 See Cornelius L. Reid, Bel Canto: Principles and Practices (New York: The Joseph Patleson Music House, 1972). 48 understanding among singers and teachers who study current and past performance techniques. This thesis has attempted to show that past pedagogies are not necessarily distant from us if we turn a critical eye on our received traditions. Let us not declare that early music is sung with a high larynx and modern classical music is sung with a low larynx. The wonderful vocal performances we hear in today’s performing venues are mixes and blends of myriad teaching techniques that might be traced to some far reaches of history, but they are not black or white, one thing and not another. I have focused on issues of laryngeal height in three published vocal treatises from three centuries past (the sixteenth, the eighteenth and the nineteenth). Some scholars see similarities to modern vocalism in these texts, while others see differences. Conflicting interpretations are a stew of scientific knowledge, personal experience (via the learned language from a teacher with a “method”) and general semantics. Because of these variables, we should be careful in our judgments of written accounts of the singing process, especially those of the distant past. Maffei’s discorso taught singers how to tastefully ornament counterpoint with fast- moving florid passaggi. He was aware of the anatomy of his voice, but focuses his attention on affective results. His passaggi set with [o] vowels tell us that his larynx was probably in a neutral-to-slightly-lower-than-neutral position at least some of the time. Jean-Antoine Bérard believed that the vertical movement of his larynx gave him his infinite capacity to color his lyrics. He knew it was possible to sing with a stationary larynx, 49 but this stuck him as absurd, presumably because of the sonic result. To Bérard, affective color was paramount, and the French had their particular brand of it. Manuel García Jr. added modern anatomical science to the singer’s toolkit, which explained why one would raise or lower the larynx in singing. Again, affective color, or vocal timbre, is the answer. He knew the pharynx was responsible for the timbres of the voice and that the larynx, as the bottom end of the vocal tube, had to yield to it in order for the singer to achieve the desired timbres. Laryngeal height is only one piece of the vast and varied puzzle that is historical vocal technique, and one that is tricky to infer due to a lack of direct references to it. Science tells us that for trained singers, laryngeal position has always been a question of degrees in relation to a stable point. Minute adjustments in its position are a matter of proprioception, if movement is perceived at all. Today’s vocal pedagogy, with the aid of science, informs us that excellent diction, beautiful tone and tasteful expression are the reasons for a larynx that is generally stable, but allowed to move by degrees. The authors of historical vocal pedagogy prized these qualities as well, although they described the larynx as flexible when it was likely fundamentally stable. 50 BIBLIOGRAPHY Asher, Veera Khare. "The Olympic Singer: Integrating Pilates Training into the Voice Studio." DMA diss., University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2009. Bacilly, Bénigne de. A Commentary Upon the Art of Singing: Remarques curiueses sur l’art de bien chanter. 1668. Translated and edited by Austin B. Caswell. New York: Institute of Medieval Music, 1968. ————. Traité de la méthode ou art de bien chanter par le moyen duquel on peut en peut de temps se perfectionner dans cet art, & qui comprend toutes les remarques curieuses que l’on peut faire. Paris: G. de Luyne, 1671. Baird, Julianne. “Solo Singing 2: The Bel Canto Style.” In A Performer’s Guide to Seventeenth-- Century Music. Edited by Stewart Carter. New York: Schirmer Books, 1997. Bérard, Jean-Antoine. L’Art du chant. New York: Broude Brothers; 1967. Bloch, Gregory W. “The Pathological Voice of Gilbert-Louis Duprez.” Cambridge Opera Journal, 19, 1, 11–31. Bridgman, Nanie. “Giovanni Camillo Maffei et sa lettre sur la chant.” Revue de Musicologie, 38, No. 113 (July 1956), 3–34. Brown, William Earl. Vocal Wisdom: Maxims of Giovanni Battista Lamperti. Enlarged edition. New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1957. Bunch-Dayme, Maribeth. Dynamics of the Singing Voice, 5 th Edition. New York: Springer, 2009. Celletti, Rudolfo. A History of Bel Canto. Translated by Frederick Fuller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Cohen, Albert. "Mersenne, Marin." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 4 Nov. 2012. <http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.libproxy.usc.edu/subscriber/article/grove/music/18 468>. Cyr, Mary. “Eighteenth-Century French and Italian Singing: Rameau’s Writing for the Voice.” Music & Letters, 61 (3), 318–37. ––––. Style and Performance for Bowed String Instruments in French Baroque Music. Farnham, Surrey, GBR: Ashgate Publishing Group, 2012. Accessed May 25, 2015. 51 Day, Timothy. “English Cathedral Choirs in the Twentieth Century.” In The Cambridge Companion to Singing. Edited by John Potter. NewYork: Cambridge University Press. 2000. Doscher, Barbara M. The Functional Unity of the Singing Voice. Lanham MD: The Scarecrow Press, 1994. Elliott, Martha. Singing in Style: A Guide to Vocal Performance Practices. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Ferranti, Taylor L. “A Historical Approach to Training the Vocal Registers: Can Ancient Practice Foster Contemporary Results?” DMA diss., Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College, 2004. Foreman, Edward V., ed and trans. Late Renaissance Singing: Giovanni Camillo Maffei, Discourse in the voice and the method of learning to sing ornamentation without a teacher (1562); Lodovico Zacconi, the practice of music, book one, chapters LVIII-LXXX (1592); Giovanni Battista Bovicelli, Rules, Passages of Music (1594); Giovanni Luca Conforto, Brief and easy method... (1603?). Minneapolis: Pro Musica Press and Edward V. Forman, 2001. Freitas, Roger. “Towards a Verdian Ideal of Singing: Emancipation from Modern Orthodoxy.”Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 127, (2002), 226–257. Galen. On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body. Translated by Margaret Tallmadge May. New York: Cornell University Press, 1968. García, Manuel Jr. Hints on Singing. Translated by Beata García. London: Ascherberg, Hopwood & Crew Ltd., 1894. ————. Mémoire sur la voix humaine présenté à l'Académie des Sciences en 1840. Paris: Duverger, 1847. ––––. A Complete Treatise on the Art of Singing. Translated by Donald V. Paschke. 2 vols. Vol. 1. New York: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1984. Harrán, Don. “Directions to Singers in Writings of the Early Renaissance.” Revue Belge de Musicologie / Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap, 41 (1987), 45-61. Harris, Ellen T. “Voices.” In Performance Practice: Music After 1600. Edited by Howard Mayer-Brown and Stanley Sadie. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990. Hehr, Elizabeth. “How the French Viewed the Differences Between French and Italian Singing Styles of the 18th Century.” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 16, No. 1 (Jun. 1985), 73–85. 52 Mancini, Giambattista. Practical Reflections on Figured Singing: Editions of 1774 and 1777 Compared, Translated and Edited by Edward Forman. Champaign, Illinois: Pro Musica Press, 1967. Marchesi, Mathlde. Ten Singing Lessons. New York and London: Harper and Brothers Publishing, 1901. McCoy, Scott. Your Voice: An Inside View. Princeton, NJ: Inside View Press, 2004. Mersenne, Marin. Harmonie universelle, contenant la théorie et la pratique de la musique (Paris, 1636). Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1963. Miller, Donald Gray. Resonance In Singing: Voice Building Through Acoustic Feedback. Princeton, NJ: Inside View Press, 2008. Miller, Richard. Solutions for Singers: Tools for Performers and Teachers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. ––––. The Structure of Singing: System and Art in Vocal Technique. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomas Learning, 1996. ––––. “The Demise of the ‘Studio Baroque’ Vocal Sound,” in On the Art of Singing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. ––––. National Schools of Singing: English, French, German and Italian Techniques of Singing Revisited. London: The Scarecrow Press, 1997. Murray, Sidney. “Jean-Baptiste Bérard’s L' Art du Chant: Translation and Commentary.” Ph.D. diss., The University of Iowa, 1965. Plank, Steven E. Ch. 6 “Articulation, Ornamentation and Interpretation.” In Choral Performance: A Guide to Historical Practice. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004. Pleasants, Henry. The Great Tenor Tragedy: The Last Days of Adonlphee Nourrit As Told (Mostly) by Himself. Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1995. ––––. The Great Singers: From the Dawn of Opera to Our Own Time. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966. Potter, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Singing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Radomski, James. Manuel García (1775 – 1832): Chronicle of the Life of a bel canto Tenor at the Dawn of Romanticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 53 Robson, Timothy. "Symposium on Early Vocal Practices Case Western Reserve University 29-31 October, 1982." The Journal of Musicology 2:1 (1983): 98. ProQuest. Accessed Feb. 22, 2014. Sanford, Sally. “Solo Singing 1.” In A Performer’s Guide to Seventeenth-Century Music. Edited by Stewart Carter. New York: Schirmer Books, 1997. Stark, James. Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Titze, Ingo R. “The Human Instrument.” Scientific American 289, no.1 (January 2007), 94– 101. ––––. Principles of Voice Production. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentiss Hall, 1994. Uberti, Mauro. “Vocal Techniques in Italy in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century.” Translated by Mark Lindley. Early Music, 9, No. 4, (Oct. 1981), 486-95, Accessed February 2, 2011. Vest, Jason Christopher. "Adolphe Nourrit, Gilbert-Louis Duprez, and Transformations of Tenor Technique in the Early Nineteenth Century: Historical and Physiological Considerations.” DMA diss. University of Kentucky, 2009. Ware, Clifton. Basics of Vocal Pedagogy: The Foundations and Process of Singing. San Francisco: McGraw Hill, 1998. Weinel, John U. "The Historic Italian School's Method for Breath Management and Registration in Singing and its Effect on Laryngeal Posture." DMA diss., University of Houston, 2009. Wistreich, Richard. Warrior, Courtier, Singer: Giulio Cesare Brancaccio and the Performance of Identity in the Late Renaissance. Aldershot, UK and Burlington VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007. ––––. “Reconstructing Pre-Romantic Singing Technique.” In The Cambridge Companion to Singing. Edited by John Potter. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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Creator Helley, Stacey L. (author)

Core Title Laryngeal height as seen in modern and historical vocal treatises, and instructional literature on historical performance practice

School Thornton School of Music

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Early Music Performance

Publication Date 09/16/2015

Defense Date 09/16/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag bel canto,Giovanni Camillo Maffei,historical performance practice,historical vocal pedagogy,Jean-Antoine Bérard,laryngeal height,larynx,Manuel García,OAI-PMH Harvest,vocal pedagogy,voice science

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Advisor Gilbert, Adam (committee chair), Brown, Bruce (committee member), Gilbert, Rotem (committee member), Helding, Lynn (committee member)

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