Placing the Voice
“Don’t talk to me about placing the voice,” remarked Sangiovanni, disgustingly, one day. It is all nonsense; God has placed your voice where it ought to be; let it alone.”
No doubt this Sangiovanni was an excellent teacher in his way (what an accompaniment he could play!); but I had crossed the Atlantic to learn what the Italians knew about voice placement, and so without arguing the question with good Sangiovanni, I decided to go to someone else to be enlightened on the subject. Through the urgent advice of the great conductor Hermann Levi, who I had the good fortune to meet in Munich, I became a pupil of the late Francesco Lamperti.
It did not take long to find out that there was such a thing as voice placement, although it was not exactly what I had been taught at home. I learned of Lamperti a different kind of voice placement from that I see taught and written about among us. What our voice cultivators mostly talk of can be placed under two heads: First, some system of breathing; second, some means of reinforcing tone. Thus on the one hand they speak of abdominal, diaphragmatic, costal, &c., breathing, and on the other hand of placing the voice forward and upward, of focusing or directing the tone to the hard palate, the teeth, the bridge of the nose and the Lord knows where not! The essential features of what Lamperti and his distinguished predecessors taught are so seldom mentioned, at least without distortion, and so neglected that there is some truth in speaking of a “lost art” of the old Italian school.
“The one great objective and foundation of their work was the placing of the voice “upon the breath.” — Lena Doria Devine
The one great object and foundation of their work was the placing of the voice “upon the breath.” This can be defined as being such control of breath emission that the attack of tone becomes simultaneous with the change of inspiration to expiration; or, in other words, it is the educating of the vocal mechanism to respond with the promptness and exactness of an instrument to the slightest amount of breath escape. With no breath escaping before the tone, and with breath emission retarded and evenly maintained by a moderate tension of the diaphragm and abdominal muscles, the voice appears to the singer poised above the breath, leaning against it as it were, instead of pushed out by it, and is sustained with perfect ease and comfort. This is voice placement upon the breath, the voice placement of the old Italian school, the “placing” on which all voice culture should be based. With the addition of practice in true legato it will develop a voice into an absolutely even instrument without the breaks and registers, to the very bringing out of which much of the lamentable teaching of to-day is directed.
There is sound sense in the words of Sangiovanni, quoted at the beginning of this article, when applied to that kind of voice placing which confines itself to the directing and focusing of the tone somewhere for reinforcement. If the mechanism where “God has placed the voice” were naturally perfect the voice placement referred to might be the right starting point in voice culture. Since, however, it is not perfect, does not possess the responsiveness and accuracy of which it is capable, rational voice placement must begin with the training that will insure the highest development of the adjustment of the vocal instrument.
Voice placing from the physical point of view should involve three distinct but interdependent processes: First, breath control; second adjustment of the instrument—that is, perfection of the tone before reinforcement; third, adjustment of the resonators. The first two need by far the greatest share of attention, and with these voice placement upon the breath is chiefly concerned. Adjustment of the resonators and locating of tone follow without much difficulty when the voice has once acquired the support of the breath and when tone production is not attended by throat effort. Resonance cannot be forced, and they who claim to reinforce tone by directing the voice forward or upward are more apt to get increased volume, through increased impulse to the vocal chords, than resonance. This placing and directing of tone somewhere before the voice can be well sustained on the breath may therefore easily degenerate into a forcing process.
I have noticed that the so-called forward and upward placing sometimes results in the cold and unsympathetic tone which Lamperti termed “frontal” and considered the most defective. The desire to gain carrying power by getting these “forward” tones has produced in certain of our church singers this “frontal” quality. No matter how true the singer’s ear may be it always makes a voice appear just a shade out of tune and renders it incapable of blending with any other.
“The holding back of the breath as taught by Lamperti (described by some as the “drinking in of the tone”) is the key to the secret of how to get the greatest amount of carrying power with the least amount of effort. ” — Lena Doria Devine
The holding back of the breath as taught by Lamperti (described by some as the “drinking in of the tone”) is the key to the secret of how to get the greatest amount of carrying power with the least amount of effort. It allows a free and uncontracted throat, and prevents the undue pressure against the cords which is apt to follow the natural inclination to push the voice out, resulting often in false intonation and eventually in injury to the vocal cords.
I do not believe that this voice placement upon the breath is being taught consistently by many of the celebrated teachers. It is not a popular way to teach. Your pupils have to be told that it will take them a long time before they can attack even the first note of their scale properly; that they can leave their music rolls at home, and that they cannot practice at all for months to come, not until they know thoroughly right from wrong production. Is not this common sense? Yet people think they can profitably devote time to sight reading, repertory and everything else while the voice is being placed.
At a recent meeting of vocal teachers I heard a speaker specially recommend the study of sight reading in connection with voice placing, and that after he had lauded the old Italian method to the sky. This certainly is inconsistent, and only goes to show how little the principles of this wonderful method are really understood by even those who presume to speak authoritatively. It is rare to take up a music journal in which some misleading statements cannot be found with reference to the old Italian method.
While writing this paragraph I picked up a current number of a musical monthly and found these lines; “No master who simply sings a given tone quality and requires you ‘to do so’ is a true teacher. This is really the old Italian way as far as research has been able to discover.” Considering that the greatest teacher of this method, Francesco Lamperti, was not a singer, and could therefore not have taught simply by personal illustration, this “research” must have been superficial. No, this “lost art” is decidedly not a mere striving after certain effects at any costs, and by any means whatever. It holds up before you a quality, beauty and purity of tone to be striven after; but it points out the path to that ideal, and there is something very definite and tangible to guide you.
Perhaps the greatest enemies to good voice placement and artistic singing are they who teach the use of certain external muscles in tone production and the fixing into certain positions of the cheeks, tongue, and larynx, &c. They have elaborated the ruinous forcing system into a science. No matter how honest the intention of these “physiologists” may be, their work is certainly based upon false assumptions. The chief one of these is the belief that whatever parts can in some way be pressed into service to assist in stretching the cords must necessarily be physiological factors in voice production.
This is an unwarranted corollary to the erroneous premise that the stretching of the cords is the one and all-important element in raising the pitch. The most advanced scientific work has confirmed and emphasized the fact that the voice is a string instrument in which variations in length and thickness play quite as important a part as tension. The structures having for their function these adjustments of the vocal cords are internal, not directly under the control of the will, and are interfered with rather than aided by the action of the external muscles. It is not difficult to see that it just this internal, finer mechanism which, not responding to an explosive and forced attack, becomes highly developed through the constant endeavor to get an easily induced attack with the slightest breath impulse—a study, I repeat, which, with masters like the elder Lamperti, was the keystone of their work.
“The time nowadays devoted to such voice placement—if any is given at all—is so short that it is any wonder we have lost sight of what years devoted to purely technical training can do for the voice. ” — Lene Doria Devine
The time nowadays devoted to such voice placement—if any is given at all—is so short that it is no wonder we have lost sight of what years devoted to purely technical training can do for the voice. It takes at least five years to prepare substantially for a career in anything worthy to be called an art or a profession. Why not for the profession for a singer? No one has yet found a way to cheat the natural laws of development.
The greater portion of the blane for the failure to make a larger number of first-class singers is usually attributed to the impatience of our pupils. I believe, however, that in a very large number of instances it is the teacher who is at fault. There is no lack of ambitious and brilliant students, especially here in America, willing and anxious to work for nothing less that the highest ideal, if they can find some one to place it before them and to keep them on the right track. But if the teacher himself regards voice culture as such a simple matter that he can see no harm in a pupil’s being allowed to practice at home after the very first lessons and if he must take up songs after two or three weeks, because he knows of nothing else to do with the voice to take up the time, can a pupil be blamed for thinking that a year or two is ample time to learn anything in vocal art?
The teacher who knows what constitutes voice placement “upon the breath” and has the ear, musical knowledge and judgement necessary to its practical application, has a standard so high and so absolute that there is not a singer before the public to-day to whom he might not point out frequent shortcomings in technic. The fact is, there are but very few singers who show good placement of the voice upon the breath. Melba is one of the few notable exceptions. The statement has been made that in Melba the Marchesi method has achieved its greatest triumph. This is not true. Melba was for five years or more the pupil of an Italian master in her own country; her voice is placed “on the breath,” thanks to his skill and knowledge of the old Italian school.
It was the exacting training of this noble method of voice production with which Lamperti brought Campanini, Albani and a host of others from obscurity into world-wide fame.
—Mme. Lena Doria Devine, "Placing the Voice,” The Musical Courier, September 1, 1897, p 26. Photo credit: Mme Lena Doria Devine (Mrs. Conrad Meyer): The Musical Courier, April 1900, p 1.
Did You Catch…
I like the part where Mme. Devine mentions that students bring piano rolls to their lessons. She’s talking about inserting a paper roll with holes in it into a mechanical piano that plays the accompaniment, which a student does today when she brings a Beyonce track on her iPhone to her lesson. It's the same idea with different technology.
Devine is right. Voice teachers then and now focus on repertoire rather than vocal technique; that’s the approach at the collegiate level. No one spends a semester or two singing scales and exercises exclusively. In a day and age when opera queens—canaries in the coal mine—whine that everyone sounds the same and there are no more great artists, what is one to do? A return to the methods and practices of the past? That’s the bazillion-dollar question.
Then there is what Devine calls the “physiologists,” those who focus on matters of anatomy and physiology. They are, of course, very much with us today. I call them the “outside-in” people—pressing here and there on the body, using straws and the like to affect a change in the voice, when the voice—as I see it—is an “inside-out” endeavor that starts within the ear.
One can do certain things to jumpstart a voice, but there is a limit to the imposition of mechanics when singing is concerned.
A wise observation in Vocal Wisdom: The Maxims of Giovanni Battista Lamperti (see the Members page): Students work from the feet up at the beginning of study, then from the head down when the voice is mature.
Here’s my observation: When the singer is singing from the head down (yes, I am talking voice placement), there is no need to manipulate with toys, fads, or gadgets.
