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.

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.