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Francesco Lamperti |
IV. ECONOMY OF BREATH.
Acareful study of tone reveals the fact that it does not
require great labor to establish normal vibrations. When there is too much
effort noise is the result. Tone is pleasant in proportion to the economy of
the breath used to initiate the vibration. In the voice, especially, all
huskiness or lack of purity of the primary vibrations is associated with waste
of breath. Breathing must not only be centred but we must carefully attend to
the sympathetic and elastic retention of the breath.
In developing this retaining action it is first necessary to
become conscious of the dual actions of breathing in making tone. Of the
breath taken into the lungs in preparation for tone, by far the larger part is
retained as a kind of sustaining condition of activity during tone production,
while a small portion is used to pass between the vocal bands and initiate the
vibration.
In producing tone the student can direct his consciousness
either to the passive conditions resulting from the right reserve of the breath
or to the small amount of breath released. Usually students think too much of
the active outgoing breath and fail to realize the great importance of that
which is held in passive, sympathetic reserve.
Various sensations have been suggested to students to
co-ordinate this marvelous complexity in the action of the diaphragm. One
teacher in Paris, with whom I studied, taught that during the making of tone we
should have a sense of "sinking" in the middle of the body. Of
course we can explain this by the fact that the breath reserved acts in
opposition to that given up or actively controlled in a kind of column to pass
between the vocal bands. The breath retained forms the drum; the small amount
passed through the vocal bands is analogous to the stick of the drum that
initiates the sound and brings the whole instrument into vibration. The full
active chest forms the bell; the small amount given up, the hammer that
initiates the sound. The breath reserved acts as the violin; the vocal bands
are the strings and the small stream of expelled breath corresponds to the bow.
My old maestro the elder Francois Lamperti, was called a
"shyster" by one who did not understand what he meant because he
taught that in giving out tone we should have the sensation of drinking.
Lamperti never explained this. Some people thought he meant
to make a tone as if taking in the breath rather than giving it out. Even with
this view of it students were led to retain or economize the breath while
making tone, especially at its initiation. In my own case I have found this
sensation connected not only with the
sympathetic or elastic retention of the breath but with a simultaneous feeling
of openness in the throat. It has been far more helpful to me than the sensation
of sinking which was purely local in the middle of the body, while in this way
we may unconsciously secure something of co-ordination.
Both of these sensations are founded upon the fact that in
making tone much breath is retained in the lungs. In the teaching of nearly all
of the great masters there has always been some step, often a simple expedient
such as these, to awaken in the student just the right action that will retain
the breath without cramping it in the lungs, but allowing simultaneously with
the retention an easy control over the small emission which makes the tone.
From Mind and Voice: Principles and Method in Vocal Training (1910) by Samuel Silas Curry, a student of Francesco Lamperti.
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