Dear John and Vocalisters:
In answer to Michal's comments on the teachings of Cornelius Ried you
wrote, in part:
>When I have heard complaints about the Reid system they have been
>that the chest voice is stressed too much. Here again, this seems
>odd since in the bel canto book Reid seems to clearly be advocating
>that the falsetto voice will develop into a usable "feigned voice"
>in the area of overlap with use and specific exercises.
Some thoughts.
For what it is worth, the comments I have most often heard about
Ried's method of teaching voice is that he separates the voice into
Chest and Falsetto and works each of these separately with the idea
that when they each are properly developed he will then work them
together into a unified voice. The complaint is that some of his
students have not been successful in combining these voice
separations into a continuous vocal process and are left with two
separate voices in spite of his procedures to make the combination of
voice registers occur.
In all fairness, this is the complaint I have heard from singers who
know singers who have had this difficulty. I am sure there are many
students of each well publicized teacher who can lodge complaints
against their teacher for difficulties that are more a part of their
own deficiencies than they are the fault of the teacher or the
teacher's methods.
For this reason I feel it is most important that each "teaching
method" be analyzed in relation to what we know about vocal function
and less in relation to what procedures were taught when and how and
what they were named. When "registers" are discussed one must keep
in mind that this term can have very different meanings. There are
"registers as we hear them", there are "registers as we feel them",
there are "registers as we observe them" via fiber optics and
spectrometer studies. The advantage of the "registers as we observe
them" is that we can more exactly understand the vocal function that
is occurring and clear away some of the confusion of definitions that
have, in the past, depended primarily on aural and sensation criteria.
This is not to imply that aural or sensation criteria are invalid but
that, with accurate observational information, the aural and
sensation criteria can more accurately reflect actual vocal function.
As singers we rely on sensation as a guide to how we use our
instrument. Why not have a more correct understanding of what our
sensations indicate about the physical function of our voices. And,
in the process, we can develop a language of sensation that is more
common among singers and is, therefore, more useful in teaching
singers.
As teachers, and to some extent singers, we rely on what we hear as
register phenomenon but our hearing is greatly influenced by how we
are taught, what is in fashion, and how what we hear "feels" in our
own voices. Consequently it is nearly impossible to achieve anything
more that a slight agreement on register phenomenon of a singer from
a group of even the finest and most successful teachers. But it is
possible to more accurately define aural register sound with the use
of spectrographic studies without the need to give a hierarchy of
values to the subsequently defined register phenomenon. If these
register definitions were then connected to the vocal function that
creates each definition it would be possible to more accurately
determine the relative effect on the vocal instrument of each
register phenomenon. At that point it would be possible to determine
just how healthy a particular method of vocal registration might be.
For what it is worth.
--
Lloyd W. Hanson
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