Elmore Bulletin

HEALTH AND SINGING.
FACTS FOR GIRLS WHO INTEND CULTIVATING THE VOICE.

Take Off Tight Corsets—Health the First Requisite—No Reason Why American Girls' Voices Cannot Be Trained at Home—Words of an Authority.

Surely there is no reason why American girls should not become as fine singers as any on the globe. They have all the requisites of perseverance, superior mental endowments and ambition. The American singers who have become famous have been trained abroad, but I hold that they can be educated at home if they are properly taught. Health is the road to success in singing as well as in other professions.

The new gospel of music I would teach to the young women of America is technique, physique and grace. It is no Delsartean fad, or anything of the kind, but common sense.

There are hundreds of so called remedies and little secrets intended to make the voice clear and smooth, such as eating dried plums, or swallowing glycerine in homeopathic phosphates. My secret is health. Body and soul and voice are so nearly connected that the disease of one means the blight of the others.

Take a healthy woman and you will never find in her those capricious freaks and nervous depressions which make life a burden to her and her friends. Unfortunately the weaker sex is granted privileges which tend to make her enjoy the sensation of enacting the role of a nervous, fading, drooping lily.

Nine times out of ten if she would remove her vicelike corsets she would soon become a healthy rose.

Health and voice are as nearly connected as physical and mental health, and the voice is the thermometer of health. A change in the physical state is first noticed in the voice and the beginning of anemia has the effect of making the voice feeble and untrue (below the pitch). Where is the young girl who does not suffer occasionally in a more or less degree from this sickness of today?

THERE'S A REMEDY.

What is the remedy, or rather the preventive? The most dangerous enemy of health is tight lacing. It is not expected that a young girl should at once recognize the far reaching and destructive effects of this most pernicious abuse, but their mothers should use all their influence to check a danger so serious to future generations.

Lacing compresses that part of the lungs so necessary to easy breathing and singing. If the lungs are so tightly compressed that they cannot expand at the sides they must find relief by going to the upper or lower part.

Every one knows, or should know that the upper part of the lungs is the weakest, and most of the irritations of the lungs begin there. It is by no means an edifying sight to see a lady singing “with her shoulders,” as I heard it called. The opposite, the abdominal breathing, is well enough for a man, but it can become very dangerous for a woman.

In spite of this well known fact many renowned singing teachers make this kind of breathing the Alpha and Omega of their method for men and women alike.

There are fine voices which have resisted every training and could not be killed. In spite of their masters. These voices, although they exist in a small minority, will make the reputation of a teacher, whether deserved or not. But if a teacher is entitled to choose his material and to discard voices he does not think worth cultivating he ought to have a success with every single pupil. The voice is like a delicate plant, the gardener cannot produce it, but he can nurse and cultivate it with most careful love. If the voice meets all the requirements in the early days of training there is no need to worry about progress later, for success is assured.
The most difficult part of voice culture should be taught first, viz, the free and easy development of the tone and equalizing of the registers. If a singer acquires these they will enable him or her to reach the highest point in art. The old singing master, Porpora, used to say that one might be able to write upon one piece of music paper all that a singer needed for instruction.

In spite of renowned conservatories the mere tone development is still the wonderful “secret.” Generally the greatest attention is paid, not to tone development, but to a musical education in all directions and branches. How shall a singer succeed who has not been taught right in the first place? We know a good many succeed who are taught wrongly, but that is because they have voices that defy all attempts to kill them. He or she will have to learn for himself or herself what to do, and do it.

Great allowance should be made for those who do not study singing for the purpose of making it their profession. The system that I advocate makes a principal point of the hygienic benefit to be derived therefrom, as it combines voice and body culture. As I said before, a healthy voice exists only in a healthy body. Overheated rooms are conducive to all the physical ills and aches known to man. No matter how many heavy wraps are put on before leaving a superheated room, it is almost impossible to preserve the lungs. The dangers are too sudden, and not even the most robust can stand them. The body should be so hardened that it does not require warm rooms.

TEACHING CHILDREN.

Should children be taught singing? The development of the ear is one of the slowest but most fundamental parts of instruction. A child is more apt to catch the sound of different dialects and idioms. I know this from experience, because my father, being in the German army, was often transferred to different places in the empire, and although I was in my childhood years I rapidly picked up the dialect in each province, and the result was that I spoke all so fluently no one could tell where I was born.

Now, this is an example for my claim that the ear and taste of a child ought to be trained early to avoid that tiresome work of undoing in later years many faults and bad habits.

I cannot imagine the feeling of becoming tired from singing. Unfortunately I am acquainted with the agony of feeling a voice fade away and becoming only a sad echo. When I was eleven years old I did too much. Oh! if I only could have stopped a great many tears might have been saved me.

There was a silver lining to the cloud that came, because I then went through a careful musical education, including method, theory and anatomy of hand and arm. However, my love for singing had not ceased, and I began again, though most timidly, my vocal studies, and gained back by arduous study what was formerly a gift of nature. This taught me much, and to my misfortune I attributed my ability to work against every fault in the voice of a singer.—Baroness Anna von Meysenbug in New York Telegram.