WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT TONE
Varieties of wrong tone . . . The origin of the Bel Canto Method… Focus, point, resonance . . . Registers
ALTHOUGH the average opera or concert audience holds a comparatively small percentage of cultured, or shall we say "musically sophisticated," persons, the rest of the audience, although musically untrained, has nevertheless very definite ideas regarding what it does and does not like. Ask the average listener what he dislikes about an artist and he will tell you point blank that he doesn’t like:
Singer A—because he sounds throaty.
B—because he has a nasal twang.
C—has a tremolo or quaver in his voice.
D—sings off key too often.
E—has a colorless, uninteresting voice.
F—yells too much; sings everything full voice.
G—lacks expression and drags everything as though it were a dirge.
H—scoops up to each tone, his attack not clean-cut. 44 I—clears his throat too frequently.
J—sounds as if he had two or three different voices. (4 K—" Just doesn’t appeal to me!"
What he does like, invariably, is the voice that is round, mellow, smoothly produced, and with every tone squarely on pitch. The voice that seems to be produced with ease and grace, that is used with assurance, and whose technique is so perfect that the singer need think only of the song’s interpretation and emotional values, that is the voice that gives pleasure both to the trained listener and to the one who merely "knows what he likes. But even though the student thinks he knows the kind of tone he should and would like to sing, and feels that his teacher also knows and is competent to teach him, there is a long weary road ahead of him.
There are hundreds of variations of tone. Some tones just miss the correct focus. Some contain too nasal a quality. Some tones have almost correct focus yet miss perfection because they are muffled and not sufficiently resonant. The problem depends upon the teacher for its solution, for it is he who must be able to hear these infinitesimal differences in quality and strive to develop a similarly acute ear in the student.