The Decaying Art of Singing
I found this article written in 1906—the year Manuel Garcia died a Centenarian—while looking for something else. Written as a review of the tenth edition of Charles Lunn’s A Philosophy of Voice, I got to the last paragraph, laughed out loud, and thought, "Has anything changed?
Who was Charles Lunn? A singer, writer, and student of Venceslao Cattaneo (the first name also appears with a“W”) and protector of the old Italian school of singing—aka Bel Canto. One of Lunn’s students was Frederic Austin, a baritone who sang the role of Gunther in Wagner’s Ring at Covent Garden in 1908. If students make the teacher, as Pauline Viardot-Garcia once said, Lunn certainly knew what he was doing.
You may also want to read a new text on the download page by Lunn titled The Voice and Its Training. It was addressed to the “Annual Meeting of the Society of Professional Musicians” in Cambridge, England, in 1899. In it, Lunn discusses Margaret Harshaw's teaching, which Lunn describes as “pectoral inflation.”
Back to the article below.
The writer makes an assertion that I ponder for its truth, not only in his time but in ours.
While a few singers by their native gifts and more by patient and wise industry arrived at doing great things, the vast majority tried to find a short cut by the aid of science; and gradually the superstition grew up that science could take the place of art and unbiassed observation.
Lunn died in February 1906, and the article appeared in April of the same year. Readers of our time may take it as an encomium to a man of substance, resolve, and purpose. Lunn’s life was all about singing. I read him to glean what he knew and thought of the great singing teachers of his time.
MR. CHARLES LUNN has long been known to me and the rest of the world as a teacher of singing whose enthusiasm for his art verges on fanaticism. Your fanatic may often be a nuisance, especially to his friends, but in art as in other walks of life he is occasionally-a necessity. He is a man of one idea and he is for ever talking about it; and we people who also want to talk object to him. Yet by rushing in where the angels of mediocrity fear to tread he sometimes manages to effect a desirable change and proves that the deepest wisdom may lie beyond the naïveté which is always taken to indicate the fool. Mr. Lunn has often been called a fool, but I fancy the only people who have found him a nuisance are those whose theories he has exploded or whose facts he has shown to be mere absurdities. A tenth edition of his biggest work has just appeared (The Philosophy of Voice by Charles Lunn. Baillière, Tindall & Cox. 1906) so it is evident his evangel has been and is being listened to. He is not precisely a youngster and must during a very active life have gained many disciples. Whether any of them will have the pluck to take up his work is a matter on which I can express no opinion. Judging from the following appendix to his book-which I make no excuse for quoting in full-Mr. Lunn himself apparently thinks so: —
In 1900 I took my original Essay, converted it into a Treatise, rewrote it, added much to it, and made it practically a new book. As it now stands it forms the first volume of my attempted great reform in the art of tuition, and may be called the Structural Department. My second volume—the Technical Department—was published by subscription for my disciples and pupils who teach (Reynolds and Co., 13 Berners Street, W.). The third volume—the Artistic Department—is too incomplete for me to finish at my years; but it was my intention to include therein a thorough Manual of Phrasing both music and thought in words, fixed on a psychological base, and showing how the two forms of appeal interchange, intersect, and intertwine. It was my intention to try and define the point of contact where the physical and spiritual tone of voice in man meet, and write a chapter on Colour, showing the influence of the angle of incidence and reflection in the crook of the instrument when submitting sound in oneness into space, and the still more complex conditions for fluffing (voce cupa), the brightness of tone and changing its colour, if required, with its quantity. These things have never been done; it must be left now for some more able hand.
I would suggest that Mr. Lunn can easily do the thing himself if he wastes no more time on polemics. He has established his position as the foremost authority on voice-production and proved his points beyond any possibility of contradiction, and instead of fighting over again and again a battle that is already won he would be more usefully employed in laying down further principles for the guidance of the next generation.
It is a curious fact that while singing is necessarily the oldest branch of the art of music, and certainly the most natural, there has been more squabbling over the art of teaching it than about any other subject known to me. As Mr. Lunn declares, chaos prevails. There are and always have been nearly as many only correct methods as teachers. In time order will prevail and we shall have to thank Mr. Lunn for it; but in the meantime each teacher is the sole possessor of the grand secret of a perfect production and all other teachers are wrong if not absolutely charlatans and rogues. It is only after devoting years to careful study of the subject that one can with some confidence take the views of any teacher at anything less than the teacher's valuation. This means that during the best years of their lives hundreds of students have no feeling of security as to the correctness of the road they are taking; and as a matter of fact though many dispute and fight with as much ardour and acerbity as their masters, many more are blown hither and thither like leaves in a gale, trying this master and that, this and that system, always hopeful of finding the truth at last, and in the long run either losing their voices altogether or finding the truth too late to make use of it. It is no exaggeration to say that in England alone thousands of good or fairly good voices are ruined, irretrievably lost, every year. Yet singing, I say, is a perfectly natural art, as natural as talking or walking or eating; and some of the singers who have created the greatest furore and won the widest fame have done so early in life, before understanding scientific voice production or the use of the laryngoscope or the meaning of abdominal breathing. What is the reason for all this confusion? Who is right and who is wrong?
Mr. Charles Lunn goes straight to the root of the business. The frontispiece of his book consists of a picture of a bird in the act of singing. He assumes that singing is natural and he insists that all the errors and bad teaching which obtain are due to interference with the almost automatic action of the lungs, throat and larynx. This is not an historical explanation of the origin of bad teaching, but it suggests the explanation. Bad, erroneous teaching began with people in a hurry for celebrity and wealth and people with middling voices who were willing-nay, anxious-to pay to have them turned into fine ones. They were not simply the easy prey of the charlatan or wrong-headed, ignorant, well-meaning and honest discoverer of effective means of breaking the voice-they sought them out, they placed a premium on humbug and ignorance. While a few singers by their native gifts and more by patient and wise industry arrived at doing great things, the vast majority tried to find a short cut by the aid of science; and gradually the superstition grew up that science could take the place of art and unbiassed observation. Honest and dishonest teachers alike believed or pretended to believe in methods and system; and if all the experts declared that a system was necessary-each advocating his own and condemning the others—it was not wonderful that the public believed them, each member of the public reserving the right to choose his own prophet. This explanation of the present chaos seems to me an inevitable corollary to Mr. Lunn's axioms and postulate.
The testimony and evidence Mr. Lunn brings forward to support his contention are overwhelming. First of all his method-a natural, bird-like production of tone with the aid of air compressed in the throat was learnt, he says, from his teacher Cattaneo, who in turn said it was identical with the method of Porpora. Now Nicolo Porpora was undoubtedly one of the greatest singing-masters who has lived, and his best pupils were remarkable for the very qualities Mr. Lunn claims to develop in his pupils and my knowledge has obtained in many cases. Again, Mr. Lunn's science is beyond doubt. Years ago he condemned abdominal breathing and the late Sir Morell Mackenzie agreed with him; and Morell Mackenzie was a more trustworthy authority than the pseudo-scientists of to-day who get their systems boomed in the monthly reviews and magazines. The essence of Mr. Lunn's teaching is that to sing well you must sing as a bird sings, which is by no means easy for civilised, artificial man and woman brought up in the faith that whatever is natural must be wrong. Every human faculty must be brought into use with a view of attaining the one end-to give vocal expression to human thought and feeling as freely and with as little effort as a bird expresses its thought and feeling. And as the nightingale's voice is of beautiful quality so must be the human voice-that is where you must start; and to ensure beautiful tone you must not get your fortes by over-exertion: rather your pianos and pianissimos must be obtained by holding power in. To achieve fine results you must use voice, heart and head—"the voice to obey, the heart to tinge with emotional glow, the head to rule for a purpose”. How all this is to be done cannot be explained here; it takes Mr. Lunn some hundreds of pages to explain it in his book; and to the book I refer my vocally inclined readers.
But neither Mr. Lunn nor anyone else can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, nor make a fine voice when nature has not provided one. Far too many people want to sing and try to do it, with the result that our ears are tortured and demoralised, and year by year the art of singing is dying out. A man without fingers does not try to play the piano; one without legs does not try to ride a bicycle; but anyone who can get out the most lamentable croak thinks himself or herself justified in getting up in a drawing-room and howling sentimental balderdash. A society should be formed for the suppression of singing save in the strictest privacy. It would meet with the most violent opposition from the fashionable singing-masters at whose doors you may see on any fine day in the season rows of carriages. They wait while stylish ladies without voice receive twenty minutes of oily flattery and absurd instruction from a man who knows nothing of the voice, nothing of music, nothing of the art of singing, but rakes in guineas all the day long. The fashionable teacher of singing is the enemy of mankind and a curse to music. When the millennium arrives, or a little later, everyone will have read and understood Mr. Lunn and the place of the singing master will know him no more for which blessing let those who will thank Providence in advance, but not too soon.
John Runciman, “The Decaying Art of Singing,” The Saturday Review, April 7, 1906, p. 423-424.
