| OCR Text |
Show CHAPTER V VOICE "The organs oj speech can be brought by intelligent training into' complete obedience to the will and jeeling."-HYRAM CORSON. When and Where to Teach Voice. Experience would indi building, articu lation, and phonetics, into courses of speech to be a waste of time. Ordinary students cannot be induced to spend enough time in prac tice to mke much improvement. If a speech department is elaborate enough, it might be well to incorporate a college course in pure technique, which would cover ) elementary theory and practice in vocal culture, pantomime, and diction. Such a course would be too highly technical to be recom mended for high school. If such a course is given, it should be under separate division, and segregated from regular inter pretation classes. Pure unrelated vocal and bodily technique would be suggested for advanced students in speech, those who plan to make speech a profession. These students will be interested enough to practice and thereby secure permanent improvement, cor-: rection, and growth in vocal and bodily powers. Voice Training Requires Experts. The training of the human voice is a scientific study which requires a lifetime. It is a science in and of itself. There are, as we know, very few good builders of the musical voice; yet there are far fewer good trainers of the speaking voice. There are many more musical voices ruined by bad vocal methods than there are singers made by good methods. If this is true of an artificial art such as music, where teachers must of necessity learn something of voice training and building, how much more true must it be of a natural art such as speaking, where everyone produces speech in some way or another. So it is difficult to find good teachers. Why then place much emphasis on the teaching of technique, since we have not the instructors trained for such courses, and the results of such procedure are doubtful? Because of the fact that there are few, if any, specialists in speech-voice training, many students of speech arts have gone to musical voice builders for training. Of course the same mechanism cate the incorporation of technical training in voice I - 37 |
