Part I
Chapter One
“No rules can suffice to make experts of those who are determined to dispense with study and practice. They who are ready to undergo toil and hardship can alone decide whether such rules are trivial and useless or worthy of serious consideration.”—Dionysius of Halicarnassus (fl. 30–10 B.C.)
They say that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. In the case of the singing art, perhaps that would not be such a bad fate, for our art has a glorious past that would bear repeating. The historical sections of this book are not comprehensive enough to qualify as serious historical studies but are intended to be a background for the study of voice. They may seem tedious to those who are in a rush to “get on with it,” but to singers who understand that the training process cannot be accomplished in a day, they can be guideposts to help us to get our bearings. This is not a list of famous singers but an account of trends and developments in the art of singing and vocal pedagogy over the centuries. I hope readers will be moved to delve deeper into this fascinating world of singing by consulting some of the excellent historical books on the subject.
Singing is primarily a form of communication and is not limited to the human species. Its major function is to convey feelings. Animals can express fear, rage, contentment, and other emotions with their cries, and recent studies have shown that such animal song is definitely organized. For example, the song of the humpback whale can be shown to have a ternary form like the da capo aria. Bird songs use the whole toolkit of western music: melody, harmony, rhythmic effects, and even canonic imitation and modulation. Perhaps there is a universal song, connecting all species, awaiting discovery. It follows that song, or something very like it, predated speech and probably dates back several hundred thousand years. It is possible that man’s earliest song evolved by imitating natural sounds, such as the song of birds, the howling of wolves, or the wind whistling through cracks in a cave wall. We have a bear bone flute from Slovenia that is 53,000 years old. I believe that someone who wished to sing but who had little voice invented the first instrument. Wagner gives us a glimpse of this primeval event in Siegfried as Siegfried attempts to imitate the sound of the forest bird with his reed pipe. Certainly, one can convey emotional meaning by the use of vowels alone, independent of any further word or grammatical structure. We can intone an aaaah [a] to express satisfaction, eeeee [i] could be a warlike cry, ooh [u] is a universal expression of wonder, and so on. No doubt the earliest song was a mixture of speech and melody that was intoned by shamans to exorcise evil spirits or by mighty hunters and warriors to dramatize their exploits. The lullaby is certainly an ancient form of song, as mothers in all cultures instinctively croon to their babies to lull them to sleep.
Vocal music had always been a major part of Jewish worship. The Bible is full of references to singing. For example, we know that the first thing that Moses’s people did, when saved from the onrushing Egyptian troops by the flooding of the Red Sea, was to sing songs of praise to the Lord.1 The Psalms were written to be sung and we know that David established perhaps the first singing school with 288 students.2 The traditional singing of the cantor is central to the Hebrew religious service and has provided a model for artistic singing for other branches of the musical tree, including the early Christian church and Italian coloratura singing. Artifacts from ancient cultures, such as the Mesopotamian, Greek, and Egyptian show singers, often accompanied by instruments, entertaining various gods or potentates. Probably, these songs were of limited range and very close to speech pitches.
Early singers soon became aware of the power of mass choral singing and used choral episodes in dramatic and religious settings. The Greek lyric theater used unison choral songs that commented on the action, voicing the reaction of the audience and sometimes even taking part in the drama. According to Donald Grout:
It is believed, [however,] that some form of musical declamation was employed for at least part of the dialogue, and the fact that the plays were given in large open-air theaters makes this probable on acoustical grounds, if for no other reason. Such declamation may have been a kind of sustained, semi-musical speech, perhaps like the Sprechstimme of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire or Berg’s Wozzeck, but moving within a more limited range of pitch. It is also probable that regular melodic settings were used in certain places.3
Poetry and melody were practically synonymous to the Greeks, a concept that has been a guiding principle to composers from the Camerata through Gluck to Richard Wagner. In fact, lyric poetry meant poetry to be sung with the accompaniment of a lyre and tragedy is based upon the verb aeidien—“to sing.” The Greek doctrine of ethos viewed music (mostly vocal music) as not only a reflection of the order of the universe but also a powerful force in itself that could affect the cosmos. Consequently, in Greek mythology, legendary singers like Apollo, Orpheus, and Amphion were able to perform awe-inspiring magical feats with their songs. “In days gone by, the sons of heaven came to the wedding of Harmonia, and the walls and towers of Thebes rose to the sounds of Amphion’s lyre.”4
EARLY VIEWS OF VOCAL MECHANICS
Virtuosic singing was held in high esteem from the earliest times. Singing was a well-developed improvisational art during the time of Homer, and Book Eight of The Odyssey describes how moved Odysseus was upon hearing songs of the Trojan War accompanied by the harp. Plato and Aristotle both imply that the vocal art had developed a high degree of virtuosity and complain of abuses of good taste by professional singers of their day. Plutarch (46–120 A.D.) voiced the familiar lament that the vocal art had degenerated from the glorious achievements of former times. He also commented on the effort necessary to develop exemplary technique.
As early as Hippocratic times (c.460–c.377 B.C.), the Greeks knew that the voice was motivated by airflow and understood the role of the organs of speech such as the tongue, palate, and head cavities. Aristotle, in De Audibilibus, discussed phonation and vocal quality. Nearly five hundred years later, Galen (c.130–c.200 A.D.) described the anatomy of the larynx and named the vocal cords the glottis (or tongue of the larynx). He discovered the relation of the recurrent nerves (nerves in the region around the larynx) to the voice and the action of the muscles in respiration. However, Galen made a basic mistake in explaining the nature of phonation. He believed that the voice was produced by a reedlike action of air passing through the slit between the vocal cords, its pitch and volume governed by the width of the space between the cords, much like the action of an organ pipe. This view prevailed for more than 1,400 years until proven false by Marin Mersenne (or Mersennus) (1588–1648), who was a mathematician, philosopher, and musical theorist. Mersenne knew that the length of an organ pipe must double for each octave lower in pitch. This would require a pipe more than two feet in length for the lower bass tones! He reasoned that the truth about the control of pitch must lie along the edges of the vocal cords and the study of the vibration of reeds.
There was little progress in scientific understanding of the physical nature of the human voice until 1741. Antoine Ferrein (1693–1769) made the first acoustic experiments on the natural larynx. He was able to demonstrate that the vocal bands function more like vibrating strings and gave the name cordes vocales, or vocal cords, to the lips of the glottis, a name that still serves us very well today.
MUSIC IN THE EARLY CHURCH
During the first three centuries of the Christian era, the older Greek and Roman musical models coexisted with the emerging ecclesiastical music of the (as yet underground) Roman Church. This early Christian vocal music was based on eastern sources, such as the Hebrew tradition and that of the Byzantine Church, which were organized around a collection of melodic motives within a given mode. The direction of this music was toward simplicity and away from virtuosity. It reflected the Church’s need to establish its own identity, separate from its pagan surroundings. There was certainly a role for improvisation, and performance was increasingly handed over to a trained body of singers. At the beginning of the fifth century, the post of Cantor, or chief musical celebrant, was borrowed from the Hebrew service and officially established in the Christian Church. A Scuola Cantorum or singing school for the training of men and boys as professional church musicians was instituted in Rome.
Pope Gregory I, Pope from 590 to 604, organized all of the music of the Roman Church into a systematic and balanced whole. In his honor we still call this music Gregorian Chant. These spare and ascetic melodies seem to us, at first hearing, devoid of emotion and color. Their limited range makes little virtuosic demand upon the soloist. Their rhythms follow the cadences of the Latin liturgical texts and do not use defined meters. Choirs consisting of men and boys sing the single line melodies in ranges that rarely extend over an octave. Yet,
The Gregorian Chants are one of the great treasures of Western civilization. Like Romanesque architecture, they stand as a monument to medieval man’s religious faith; they were the source and inspiration of a large proportion of all Western music up to the sixteenth century. They constitute one of the most ancient bodies of song still in everyday use, and include some of the noblest artistic works ever created in pure melody.5
The main reason that music remained in this restricted and circumscribed form during the early Middle Ages was the philosophy of the church that music was only good if it was subservient to the liturgical text and inspired the mind to holy thoughts. Instrumental music, having no words, could not do this and was, therefore, banned from the services. If music aroused pleasure in the listener by itself, it was considered the creation of the devil. Many early Christians, as well as Jews, felt that God could only be worshipped with the human voice.
There was no clear distinction between the sacred and the secular in the mind of Medieval man, for the influence of the Church extended into every area of life. In a very real sense, the Gregorian Chants were the music of the people during the Middle Ages and were as familiar to the average person as folk music is today. As the Church became more established, creative poets and musicians made attempts to free and expand the range of expression of the Chants. Nonbiblical additions to the liturgy, such as the hymn, the trope and sequence (melodic and textual embellishment), and the conductus, were often based upon easily remembered popular and folk tunes. These accretions were nonbiblical and subjective in nature, and the Church saw them as deviant and heretical. Although many of these additions were actually written to defend against heresy, the Council of Trent finally abolished them around 1560.
The eleventh century saw the beginnings of the liturgical drama, which depicted scenes from the Bible and lives of the saints, often in the vernacular. Although the range of this music was still very limited, there was almost certainly opportunity for vocal display and improvisation. In occasional treatises of the time, singers were cautioned against vain display, excessive ornamentation, and carelessness. Since the liturgical dramas combined stage action with singing, one could think of these works as forerunners of opera. There was little development of the liturgical drama after the fourteenth century, and the form degenerated into something like a play with interpolated songs as its performance increasingly passed into the secular world.
SECULAR MUSIC IN THE MIDDLE AGES
It is easy to assume that there was little or no secular vocal music during the Middle Ages, but this assumption would be incorrect. To be sure, Christian monks kept the only records during this time and those that we have of sacred music are faithfully accurate. Secular music was an oral tradition from the sixth to eleventh centuries and, even if we knew as much about it as we know about church music, we would probably find it uninteresting artistically. Will the rock music of today interest scholars a thousand years from now? There must have been a great quantity of this music composed, for we have seen that many of the accretions that were added to the liturgical service came from popular sources. The major problem for scholars is that there are very few records of this secular music preserved.
The oldest preserved specimens of secular song were those of the goliards, who were traveling vagabonds, rogue monks, and footloose students. The goliards traveled from one center of learning to another in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, before the founding of the great resident universities. Some of their Latin song texts called the Carmina Burana have been preserved, but precious little actual music. Most likely these songs were still based on Gregorian Chant. Many of the songs were distinctly bawdy, and the goliards were not appreciated by respectable people. Carl Orff has captured the flavor of these texts in modern times in such works as Carmina Burana and Catulli Carmina.
In the tenth century, there appeared a group of itinerant performers called jongleurs—medieval pagliacci, who traveled from place to place entertaining with songs, tumbling and juggling tricks, and dance and playing various instruments. The jongleurs were not composers or creative artists but performed vast repertoires of songs others had written. These songs still did not require a great deal of vocal virtuosity. The main kind of song they performed was the chanson de geste–a long narrative epic poem set to a simple, repetitive monodic melody. As feudalism became more established, some of these somewhat unsavory performers were able to give up their precarious nomadic way of life and were elevated to the status of minstrels in the households of feudal lords. The jongleurs were important in the history of western vocal tradition because they were really the first professional performance artists.
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, under the weight of waves of barbarian invaders who brought along their own languages, Latin began to weaken as a means of communication for all segments of society in Europe. It remained the language of the Church and of educated persons, but secular society increasingly turned to the vernacular for the transactions of daily business. In Southern France there flourished a new breed of knightly poet-musician, who elevated the local vernacular language (Provençal) to the realm of high art. These artists, who were called troubadours, composed songs and poems about idealized courtly love (usually about someone else’s wife). In Northern France they were called trouvères and composed their songs in the language of the root of modern French called langue d’oïl.
At least in the beginning, the troubadours and trouvères were not performers, but were educated poets and composers who, being wealthy, could afford to hire jongleurs or minstrels to perform their works. The character of these knightly composers’ songs was still, as we have seen, a musical extension of speech pitches, with ranges frequently of only a sixth and seldom more than an octave. The melodies were mostly syllabic with occasional flourishes of ornamentation, both vocal and instrumental. The familiar story of the love of Lancelot and Guinevere gives one the flavor of the subject of most of these poems.
In Germany the counterparts of the troubadours and trouvères were the minnesingers. The minnesingers were greatly influenced by the French, and early examples of their art show few departures from the examples of their masters. Wagner was very interested in the stories of these medieval knight-minstrels and immortalized the story of one of them, Tannhäuser, in his fourth opera. Another, Walther von der Vogelweide, is quoted in Die Meistersinger, which is an accurate portrayal of the lives of the successors of the minnesingers.
The meistersingers were cultured middle-class citizens, artisans, and tradesmen of the towns growing up in Germany after the thirteenth century. The meistersingers’ stolid love for the art of singing made them create a morass of rules for the composition and performance of their songs, which is ridiculed by Wagner in the character of Beckmesser. Because of these rules and strictures, their music lacked spontaneity and the meistersingers were recognized mostly for their poetic achievements. The guild-like movement of the meistersingers finally dissolved in the eighteenth century. During this time, there was also a corresponding movement toward middle-class participation in the vocal art in France and other parts of Europe.
As the thirteenth century dawned, monophony began to lose artistic significance for the upper classes that had fostered it and for professional musicians, who began to see greater expressive possibilities in writing music for the simultaneous performance of many individual melodic lines. Polyphony, with its rich texture of harmonic and contrapuntal complexity, was founded upon the bedrock of the Gregorian Chants. Paradoxically, it was the somewhat improvisatory art of troping in the tenth century that led to early experiments in polyphony. As a result, as polyphony grew more complex and notation more precise, the composer gradually gained control of the performance of his music. Monophony and improvisation were relegated to secular popular forms of entertainment for a period of four hundred years. We are seeing the results of this movement today, for better or worse, in synthesized pre-recorded music, where the composer has no need of an interpretive artist at all. More germane to our subject, it was in this age of the beginnings of polyphony, when the expanded range and complexity of music began to exceed the skill of the average untrained choir member, that the art of Bel Canto was founded.
THE A CAPELLA PERIOD (1474–1640)
The study of vocal technique was not begun by Caccini6; it goes back much further. We have already discussed the evidence of vocal virtuosity in ancient times and the Middle Ages. Vocal instruction had always been done by ear and by example, a method still in use in the present day. After the invention of the printing press in 1455, treatises on singing began to appear during the A Capella period. The earliest was probably Conrad von Zabern (d.1476–1481) in 1474. Vocal training was commented upon by several masters such as Gioseffo Zarlino (1517–1590), Lodovico Zacconi (1555–1627), Domenico Pietro Cerone (1566–1625), Michael Praetorius (1571–1621), Daniel Friderici (1584–1628), the previously mentioned Mersenne, Giovanni Camillo Maffei (fl. 1562–1573), and Giovanni Battista Doni (1594–1647) in treatises dealing with music in general during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The pupils were generally young boys who were taught by imitation. It was expected that the teacher should be a fine singer. In 1613, Domenico Cerone observed, “The fine singer does more with his ear than with his mouth; for the ear is the bridle and rein with which he should control and master the stress and raging of the voice, which are common mistakes of all beginners.”7
In 1562, Giovanni Camillo Maffei wrote Discorso della voce e del modo d’apparar di cantar di Gargantua, senza maestro, perhaps the first comprehensive book on voice. Marin Mersenne, Cerone, and Maffei all had amazing knowledge of physiology. Mersenne was the co-discoverer of overtones and first to recognize the significance of back tongue position in vowels. The singers were all composers. Conrad von Zabern recognized that more was needed from the singers of his day than correct musicianship. The increasingly difficult polyphonic music demanded control of the breath and an extended range. For Mersenne, this was the difference between mere singing and fine singing: “The beauty of the voice and expression belong not to their rules of the melody, but generally to the way and manner of singing.”8 Over the years, there have been many attempts to describe, in brief, all the qualities necessary for fine artistic singing. St. Isadore of Seville made one such description around 600: “They [fine voices] are light and delicate, i.e., sharp, clear, and penetrating, as those of women, children, and sick people, or full and ample, as those of men . . . because of much breath coming out.”9 He classifies voices as (1) acuta, sharp, like a stringed instrument; (2) dura, hard, like thunder or a hammer against an anvil; (3) aspera, raucous and not smooth (uneven and broken up); (4) cocca, blind, i.e., it stops as soon as it is sounded (it is dull and unresonant),; (5) vinnola, delightful, i.e., sweet, soft, and flexible; and (6) perfetta, high, sweet, and clear: “The perfect voice is high, sweet, and clear; it is high so as to be adequate in the upper range; it is clear so as to fill the ears amply; it is sweet so as to delight the spirits of the listeners. If any of these is lacking it is not perfect.”10
These sentiments were repeated by Aurelianus Reomensis in the ninth century, Hieronymus de Moravia in 1250, and Blasius Rossettus in 1529. Other authorities added the requirements of good diction, pleasing timbre, power, flexibility, and range (mastery of registration). The term vocal register was coined in the Middle Ages, probably influenced by the various registers of the organ. The familiar three-register concept of the voice seems to have been in place in the twelfth century. John of Garland (c. 1193–c. 1270) says,
It must be known that the human voice exists in three forms: it is a chest voice, throat voice, or head voice. If it is a chest voice, then it is in a low register; it ought to be in the lowest part of a piece. If it is a throat voice, it is in a middle position in relation to each, that is to the low and the high. And just as far down the chest voice is in the low register, so the head voice is high in the upper register. And, in regard to the way of singing, chest voices ought to be placed in their proper place, that is in the lower part, throat voices also ought always to have the middle place in the upper sections.11
As we have seen, the fact of the true nature of the primary vibration—that it is instituted by the vocal cords—was not yet known, so we can understand Jerome of Moravia’s (c. 1250) statement of the prevailing opinion, “We call chest voices those that form the notes in the chest; throat voices those that form the notes in the throat, and head voices, those that form them in the head.”12 The chest voice, of course, is the main register of men, but singers also utilized Throat Bass (Strohbass) or Growl Register during this period.
Much of the early training had to do with diet and exercise. The masters considered posture to be important. Of course, they stressed beauty of tone, but also strength. Singers varied the timbre according to the text before 1640. Mersenne understood the importance of the resonators to amplify the glottal tone. All the authorities condemned too wide a mouth opening. Daniel Friderici recommended a fine tremolo (trill) with slow or fast pulsation. Roman schools practiced “hard and difficult things”13 an hour a day.
Rossettus recognized that the singer must study tonal strength, breath technique, and pitch within the particular vocal range. Doni mentioned the use of the aspirated attack during his time. Several authors recognized the importance of the tuning of the resonators to the musical pitch, by postulating that there is one characteristic middle tone for each voice and that the higher and lower tones should be developed from it. You might call this the “sweet spot in the voice.”
Zacconi and Cerone reported that the performers in the first operas were chamber singers who were accustomed to singing with the accompaniment of lutes, viols and such. They had to get advice from good church singers who understood forte singing. Critical listeners expected singers to be masters of all levels of volume. Special forms of dynamic effects for livening up sustained tones were popular. There were the simple crescendo, the messa di voce, and the esclamazione (a fortissimo attack diminished to a thread of a tone.) The crescendo was known before 1601. Caccini renounced all claims as the inventor of the messa di voce, preferring the esclamazione. He was especially interested in the expressive uses of these devices. The roots of embellishment, improvisation, and coloratura, therefore, lay in furthering the aim of more expression and not mere display.
The tenor of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is synonymous with today’s baritone. The barytonus is synonymous with bass; the contratenor with the alto, but the contratenor’s range was somewhat similar to today’s lyric tenor. The ability of the male singer to mix registers to extend the range upward was known, possibly even in the Middle Ages. A relatively small vocal range was the rule for the choral singer of the sixteenth century. Soprano, alto (counter tenor), and tenor sang within a tenth—seldom more than that, and often less. The bass usually sang little more than a tenth. Singers were permitted to use an extended range and were encouraged to do so, if the voice was beautiful in all its parts. The training process during this period was:
1. Solmization (solfeggio);
2. Singing the melody on vowels;
3. Singing the text.
Good diction was esteemed, and excessive passagework was found to be injurious to the text. All vowels were approved but generally vocalized on [a], [e], and [o]. [u] and [i] were considered ugly and troublesome. Aspirated coloratura was frowned upon. Rossettus made the earliest attempt to define vocal legato. Mersenne coined the term “hammered” (martellato) for coloratura. Many of the ornaments with which we are familiar today, such as the trill and the appoggiatura, were invented in this period.
NOTES
1. Exodus, 15:21.
2. Chronicles, 1:25, verse 7.
3. Donald Jay Grout, A Short History of Opera (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947) 12.
4. Euripides, “Phoenician Women” in David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, eds., The Complete Greek Tragedies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955–1957) vol. 3, 824.
5. Donald Jay Grout, A History of Western Music (New York: Norton, 1960) 29–30.
6. Giulio Caccini (1551–1618). Caccini was a singer, composer, teacher and instrumentalist. He was the most influential member of the Camerata, Count Bardi’s group of artists and intellectuals who produced the first opera. Caccini was also partly responsible for the development of the new recitative style that replaced polyphony as the primary vocal form. As a teacher, he instructed the first opera singers in the art of expression and illumination of the text by artful embellishment of the melody, an art that blossomed into the full glory of the Bel Canto era. Untold numbers of vocal students have sung Caccini’s Amarilli without realizing the historical importance of its composer.
7. Bernhard Ulrich, Concerning the Principles of Vocal Training during the A Capella Period and until the Beginning of Opera (1474–1640) (Minneapolis, Pro Musica, 1973) 20. Domenico Cerone (1566–1625) was a musically trained priest who was employed by Phillip II of Spain. In 1609 he wrote a treatise on general vocal music, with some comments about singing technique.
8. Ulrich, Concerning the Principals of Vocal Training 18.
9. Ulrich, Concerning the Principals of Vocal Training 18.
10. Philip A. Duey, Bel Canto in Its Golden Age (New York: King’s Crown, 1951) 32.
11. Duey, Bel Canto in Its Golden Age 33.
12. Duey, Bel Canto in Its Golden Age 33.
13. Ulrich, Concerning the Principals of Vocal Training 57. Bernhard Ulrich believed that this quote probably referred to studies in attack, 58.