Scan 9
Musical Courier 1895-07-17: Vol 31 Iss 802, 1895
57 lines. Read by computer on 21 September 2026. Printed page 10. See the scan on archive.org.
1The Cord Stretching Office of the Palatal Muscles.
2"A New Discovery."
4The coming lines are not intended to mark out the discovery itself—that will be reserved for the next article—but to indicate the sharply defined boundary between the new and the old, between the modern advances in strict physiological knowledge of voice and its wonderful value in application and the utterly non-physiological, empirical and uncertain notions of what is commonly called the Old Italian School.
6For several years before the full discovery was made the writer had become convinced that the contraction of the muscles which extend downward from the soft palate (rear roof of the mouth) to the Adam's apple, or larynx, had a remarkable, an almost decisive, influence upon both the pitch and the quality of the voice. So unmistakable was this power, so instantaneous and remarkable was the improvement of tone and extension of range when the pupil had learned voluntarily to contract these muscles, that he devised many exercises to give easy control over them. He even wrote thirteen correspondence lessons upon the principle guessed at, and received almost incredible reports. In sober truth, the English language was exhausted to find adequate words of praise. Some were so pathetic and overwhelming that he did not dare place them upon his circulars.
8The practices were right; the principle, guessed at, was wrong.
10All the vocal literature of five languages was scoured to find a surer explanation. To adopt the more convenient, though, I fear, less convincing ego, I, John Howard, procured all the works that could be found which related to the Italian school. By one of the remarkable chances which have attended me I learned that Teschner had recently died and that his whole library was for sale. His entire life had been spent in collecting, from antiquarian libraries and from private sources, all the writings of these old Italian maestri, even down to Porpora.
12Never will be forgotten the sensation of triumphant joy which overcame me when the original works of both Tosi and Mancini were placed in my hands! Reflect, dear reader, upon the vast enthusiasm which must have animated the blatant hosts of foreign devotees to the old Italian school to allow an American to capture these priceless works (as they must have been considered)—an American, a necessarily illiterate, unmusical and voiceless American! Months had elapsed since the catalogue was issued.
14As Tosi had been translated into English (the work is still procurable from Edgar A. Werner, West Twenty-third street, New York), and as the translation had been criticised as being unfair, I translated it myself, as also Mancini, though I procured also a French copy of the latter work, presented by me to my good friend Frederick W. Root, of Chicago.
16The English translation is as fair as a strict matching of each and every Italian work with a corresponding English synonym can possibly be.
18But what was found in either work concerning the palatal muscles? Will it be believed that they were not mentioned? That is the refractory, or, as Emerson says, the recalcitrant fact. Let anyone who has access to these works disprove it by a single line of quotation. Were there other writers of this date? None of the slightest value. Bertoletti's and Vallera's works were procured; also almost numberless sheets of notes, valued by Teschner, I have understood, because they were marked by their composers, Porpora and others; but even these marks over meaningless runs and passages were so insignificant that the whole mess went into the rubbish barrel, it was so cumbrous and so much in the way. Exultant thanks will be given to anyone who can cite a single physiological precept or exercise more than three-fourths of a century extant. Marks and Agricola quoted from these two authors, but never in a physiological regard.
20It is only 120 years since Mancini wrote; about 160 since Tosi. What folly to need traditions from such recent periods! Bennati, who wrote in 1832-33, this same now dying century, was a pupil of one of the later Italian masters of the castrate period, Pacchierotti, of whom was written that "his voice was so beautiful that when he had begun a tone the only wish was that he would never check or change it." How utterly unreasonable to suppose that our almost contemporaneous writers concealed traditions that they possessed and inflicted on their readers their own views and their conclusions from the laryngoscopic examinations of such modern voices as Sonntag's, Rubini's, Lablache and David! Bennati did not even hint at his private possession of a single tradition bequeathed to him by the castrate, Pacchierotti. Is it not the utterest of unutterable presumptions, if not deceits, for these latter day billboard boasters of private traditions to interfere with our honest attempts to make our science, art and living profession a little more respectable?
22Was there anything of earlier date? I read this from the fourth century in the translated words of Angelini Buotempi: "The Pupils in the Roman School [Römischen Schule] were compelled to practice daily one hour in difficult intonations; one hour in trill practice; one hour in rapid passages; one hour in literature of music; one hour in forming taste—all this in the presence of a master and before a mirror to avoid all kinds of grimaces [pronounced grima'ces] and unskillful movement of muscles, either in wrinkling the forehead or blinking the eyebrows or distorting the mouth. All this was the business of the morning!"
24"In the afternoon one-half hour was given to the study of 'Schalles' (waves); one-half hour to simple counterpoint; one-half hour to rules of composition, given by a master; one-half hour to literature, and the rest of the day to clavier playing and the preparation of motettes, psalms and other music suitable to the pupils' talent. Besides this they were often allowed to go to the portia Angelica to sing against the echo in order to detect their peculiar faults in the answers."
26So writes Zamminier, the translator; but I cannot find a female name in his pages, and must conclude that only boys went through this frightful drill even at that early date, fifteen centuries ago! When we remember that, fourteen centuries later, Mancini, in describing the vocal organs called the wind-pipe an artery, the physiological value of the third century teaching will become vividly apparent—and Mancini wrote only 120 years ago. Men have lived as long and longer, and yet we are in need of traditions!
28No one could affirm that the old Italians had a method of strictness and infallible results, unless the anatomists of that day and the physiologists had discovered the action of the vocal parts. We have seen that Mancini knew absolutely nothing thereof; but what did the professional anatomists and physiologists, whose names have come down to us with lustre, know of this particular subject? It cannot be discovered that any one of them, even 120 years ago, gave the matter any especial attention. Liskovins, just a century ago, wrote a little work, of which I have been in possession. He makes some shrewd guesses, but did not suspect the essential truths. Haller, forty years before the same period, went so far astray, even in his words about respiration, as to declare that he had seen the diaphragm rise in the bodies of animals upon contraction. Nothing especial can be found in his many immense volumes, all written in Latin, upon the vocal action of the throat. His special studies were the diaphragm, the reproductive organs and the arteries. Zinn, in 1755, made great advances in the knowledge of the eye, but said little about the voice.
30Giant strides were made during the following ninety years. Luschka and Henle wrote somewhere in the fifth decade of this departing century. The writer believes that no diagrams or descriptions can even now be found which will exceed in beauty and accuracy those of this noble pair. At eighty years of age, with his full day occupied in dissections of the three or four cadavers always under examination in his private dissecting room, Henle's admiring students gave him a dinner of such liberal proportions that at its close they took him home in a droschka—so one of the guests told me personally. For once Homer nodded and slept!
32At about the same time arose two German writers who devoted themselves to the study of the voice, Harless and Merkel. They studied and experimented enormously. The former gave great attention also to hearing and sight, and still in the department of voice he actually anticipated the stroboscopic experiments of Oertel, though the latter appears to have claimed the discovery.
34Perhaps the readers will be interested to know what the stroboscopic process is. It is the use of a mirror made to vibrate so nearly at the same rate as the vocal chords that the latter will appear to sway so slowly that the movements may be actually seen one by one, and be criticized—a wonderful invention!
36But although Harless sacrificed so large a part and Merkel the whole of his life, neither of them had the right conditions to discover the secret of the artistic singing voice, for there was but one means of full success. It did not occur to them to gain personal control over each separate muscular agent, and then to make the actual trial of dismissing or intensifying first one and then another, and later one group and then another, meanwhile giving others in daily lessons the same voluntary power, and observing the comparative changes in their own voices and the voices of others. This is not guessing, but actually knowing beyond the chance of error.
38So here, after this rambling but not altogether impertinent digression, return will be made to the soft palate, to the action of its muscles upon the vocal chords. But the fuller elucidation of this most valuable discovery, which the writer distinctly claims as wholly his own, must await another issue of THE MUSICAL COURIER.
40JOHN HOWARD,
41321 West Fifty-ninth street, New York city.
43Innes' Band.—The Innes Band gave two entertainments at Lincoln Park, in Indianapolis, last week. War and Peace and A Day At the World's Fair are the attractions on the programs.
45Wagner's Debt to the Greek Drama.
46(Continued.)
48The attempt to found in modern times a national drama that will be in any sense a counterpart of that of ancient Athens cannot be otherwise than futile. The times have changed, conditions have changed, and the relations of men and nations are different. In the Athenian state, especially during the time of Pericles, the whole spirit of the age was summed up in the word art. It was the grand national and universal topic of interest. Art was the one great reality to the Greek mind. In Rome this gave way to the desire for empire and the passion for civil government. Rome had no glorious art age. During the middle ages religious and federal chivalry was the one great reality. These have all been replaced in modern times by social problems. Economic struggle and the relations of man to man and nation to nation are the all-absorbing topics. Art is relegated to a secondary position, and must develop itself apart. It must be fostered like a hothouse plant. In Athens, on the other hand, art grew up naturally. It found a congenial and fertile soil. It became one of the component parts of Athenian civilization. Under these conditions the drama was developed fully and freely, and by the natural course of events it became a national institution. But it was easier for this to occur in a civilization that was confined to a single state in a small peninsula than in the widely diffused civilization of modern times, embracing, as it does, so many nations, and in which one country borrows so freely from another. Modern civilization is too heterogeneous as compared with the homogeneity of that of Athens.
50Wagner's national drama, instead of being a free and spontaneous growth, is factitious. It is the result of a deliberate and studied effort of one individual, and national art does not grow in so mechanical a manner. Wagner surely reflects the national characteristics in his music, but only in the same way as many others among the German musicians. As to the establishment of a distinctively German drama, he himself recognized the futility of the attempt, and so acknowledged it in his speech at the laying of the corner-stone of the Bayreuth Opera House.
52The second characteristic of the Greek tragedy that very strongly impressed Wagner was the use of myths. The entire range of Greek drama, with but one or two exceptions, was mythological in its subject matter. To the Greek mind the only material that was worthy of representation in their great religious art spectacle was some event selected from the lives of their gods and deified heroes. The propriety of this in a national drama appealed to Wagner with especial force. During his early studies, when his art ideas were in a state of incubation, the value of the myth as a medium of expression suddenly burst upon him like a revelation. He says concerning it: "It was then that I found my deliverance as an artist, and obtained the most certain faith in the future of art."
54He arrived at his belief in the appropriateness of the myth first on account of its artistic fitness. The ideality of the myth most naturally linked itself with the ideality of music. Music, the most imaginative of the arts, the furthest removed from the ordinary commonplace of life, should associate itself with the most nearly allied themes. There has always been in man's nature an innate craving for idealism. In Greece this craving was satisfied by the drama. In modern times, however, the drama is given over to realism, and our love of idealism finds its satisfaction in music, revealed in its highest type especially in the music of Beethoven, and Wagner said that the "natural correspondent of the music of Beethoven he had found in the myth."
56Furthermore, in the myth he found a type of the universal. He wished to build a drama that, like that of the Greeks and also that of Shakespeare, would be typical of universal ideas that would endure for ages. To Wagner the historical lacked universality of interest. In history man is bound and fettered by a thousand conventionalities, rarely acting according to his true nature, but ever narrowed by the necessities of a stilted and local civilization. In the myth, on the other hand, we have the man of free impulse, unhampered by the chains of a crystallized civilization, but acting according to his own individual nature, and, by reason of his remoteness from modern associations and customs, capable of receiving an idealistic touch that would appear absurd in a being amenable to the social laws and usages of any recent age. As has often been said, the highest manifestation of spiritual perfection is in the ideal. The highest manifestation of physical perfection is in the type. The highest manifestation of genius is in the realization of spiritual and physical perfection in the idealized type. Aeschylus and Sophocles accomplished this in many of their characters. Wagner purposed to do the same thing in his dramas. Indeed, he believed that in the mingling of the most ideal of arts—music—with the idealized type as exemplified in the myth, there would result the most perfect manifestation of artistic genius that the world had ever seen. Underneath Wagner's dramas there is a deep philosophical purpose. He wished them to be more than simply reproductions of ancient beings moving about on the stage. He wished them to be symbolical of ideas and truth, universal and permanent. As the characters of
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