Vocal Expression - A Class-book of Voice Training and Interpretation

Katherine Jewell Everts

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• Publié par: gubef
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 30
• Langue: English

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Vocal Expression, by Katherine
Jewell Everts
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Title: Vocal Expression
A Class-book of Voice Training and Interpretation
Author: Katherine Jewell Everts
Release Date: March 30, 2010 [eBook #31828]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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VOCAL EXPRESSION
A CLASS-BOOK OF VOICE
TRAINING AND INTERPRETATION
BY
KATHERINE JEWELL EVERTS
AUTHOR OF
"THE SPEAKING VOICE"


HARPER & BROTHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMXI

Books by
KATHERINE JEWEL EVERTS
Vocal Expression net $1.00
The Speaking Voice. Post 8vo net 1.00
HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY HARPER & BROTHERS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER, 1911

PLAN OF THE BOOK
PAGE
To the Pupil
Introduction 1

PART I

STUDIES IN VOCAL INTERPRETATION

Preliminary Study:—To Establish a Conscious Purpose. 11
Discussion:—The Relation of the Speaker to His Audience.
Material:—Direct Appeal in Prose and Verse, with Suggestive
Analysis.
Selections for Interpretation.

First Study:—To Establish Vitality in Thinking. 56
Discussion:—Action of the Mind in Reading Aloud.
Material:—The Essay and Didactic Poetry, with Suggestive Analysis.
Selections for Interpretation.

Second Study:—To Establish Intelligence in Feeling. 87
Discussion:—Emotional Response and Abandon.
Material:—Lyric Poetry, with Suggestive Analysis.
Selections for Interpretation.

Third Study:—To Develop the Whimsical Sense. 135Discussion:—Humor and Fancy.
Material:—Fairy Story, Fable, and Nonsense Rhyme, with
Suggestive Analysis.
Selections for Interpretation.

Fourth Study:—To Develop Imaginative Vigor. 168
Discussion:—The Picture, the Atmosphere, the Action.
Material:—Short Story and Epic Poetry, with Suggestive Analysis.
Selections for Interpretation.

Fifth Study:—To Develop Dramatic Instinct. 220
Discussion:—Impersonation and Characterization.
Material:—Monologue and Play, with Suggestive Analysis.
Selections for Interpretation.

PART II

STUDIES IN VOCAL EXPRESSION

Introductory Discussion:—The Vocal Vocabulary. 249
Study in Pause and Change of Pitch.
Study in Inflection.
Study in Tone Color.

PART III

STUDIES IN VOCAL TECHNIQUE

Introductory Discussion:—Tuning the Instrument. 295
How to Support the Tone. Directions and Exercises.
How to Free the Tone. Directions and Exercises.
How to Re-enforce the Tone. Directions and Exercises.
TO THE PUPIL
Let me trace the evolution which has led to the plan of this text-book. A class in
elocution of which you are a member is given a paragraph from Modern
Eloquence, a bit from an oration or address of Beecher or Phillips or Beveridge,
to study. The passage appeals to you. You are roused by it to an eager, new
appreciation of courage, conservatism or of the character of some national
hero. You "look" your interest. You are asked to go to the platform. You are
glad. You want to repeat the inspired word of the prophet. You begin
confidently to voice the words of the great orator—the words which you had
lifted alive from the page—but in your voice they sound now formal, cold,
lifeless. You hesitate, your emotion is killed, your thought inhibited, your
eagerness gone, your impulse dead—but you have made a discovery. You
have become conscious of a great need, and your teacher, if she be wise, has
discovered the nature of that need. You consult together and find three things
have failed you, and, through you, the orator you wished to interpret. Thesethings are your mind, your vocabulary, and your voice. You find that your need
is threefold—it is the need to feel intelligently and to think vitally on your feet;
the need to acquire a vocal vocabulary; the need to train your instruments of
expression—voice and body.
To help you and your teacher to meet this threefold need is the wish of this
book; and the book's plan is the result of the author's experience with her own
pupils in watching the evolution of their skill in vocal expression, the
development, along natural lines, of their ability to speak effectively.
VOCAL EXPRESSION
[Pg 1]INTRODUCTION
The strongest impulse of the human heart is for self-expression. The simplest
form of expression is speech. Speech is the instinctive use of a natural
instrument, the voice. The failure to deal justly with this simple and natural
means of expression is one of the serious failures of our educational system.
Whether the student is to wait on another's table or be host at his own; whether
he is to sell "goods" from one side of a counter or buy them from the other;
whether he is to enter one of the three great professions of law, medicine, or
theology; "go on the stage" or platform; become Minister to France or President
of the United States, it remains precisely true that to speak effectively will be
[Pg 2]essential to his success, and should be as essential to his own happiness as it
will be to that of all involved in his pursuit of success.
Yet, if we give heed at all to the question of voice and speech, it is our last, not
our first, consideration. We still look upon the mind as a storehouse instead of a
clearing-house. We continue to concern ourselves with its ability to take in, not
its capacity to give out. Voice and speech are still left to shift for themselves
during the period of school life when they should be guarded and guided as a
most essential equipment for life after school days are over. To convert the
resultant hard, high-pitched, nasal tone which betrays the American voice into
the adequate agent of a temperament which distinguishes the American
personality, and to help English speech in this country to become an efficient
medium of lucid intercourse, such is the object of this book.
In an address upon the "Question of Our Speech" delivered before a graduating
class at Bryn Mawr, several years ago, Mr. Henry James said:
[Pg 3]"No civilized body of men and women has ever left so vital an interest to run
wild, to shift, as we say, all for itself, to stumble and flounder, through mere
adventure and accident, in the common dust of life, to pick up a living, in fine,
by the wayside and the ditch.
"The French, the Germans, the Italians, the English, perhaps, in particular, and
many other people, Occidental and Oriental, I surmise, not excluding the Turks
and the Chinese, have for the symbol of education, of civility, a tone-standard;
we alone flourish in undisturbed and in something like sublime
unconsciousness of any such possibility."
So searching an arraignment by so eminent a scholar before an audience of so
high a degree of intelligence and culture seems to have been necessary to
command an adequate appreciation of the condition of "Our Speech" and to
incite an adequate effort toward reform. Since the arraignment was made andafterward published, classes have been organized, books written, and lectures
delivered in increasing abundance, forming a veritable speech crusade—and
[Pg 4]the books and the classes and the lectures have availed much, but the real and
only "reliable remedy" lies with the teacher in the public and private schools
and colleges of the United States. And it is to the teacher of English and
Elocution that this Class Book on Vocal Expression is offered.
Learning to Talk might have been a truer, as it had been a simpler, title, yet the
more comprehensive phrase has justifiable significance, and we have chosen it
in the same spirit which discards for the text-book in Rhetoric or English
Composition the inviting title Learning to Write.
There is a close analogy between the evolution of vocal and the evolution of
verbal expression. The method of instruction in the study of the less heeded
subject of the "Spoken Word" throws an interesting light on the teaching of the
more regarded question of the "Written Word." An experience as teacher of
expression and English in a normal school in Minnesota has influenced the
author of these pages to so large an extent in the formulation of her own
[Pg 5]method of study, and so in the plan of this volume, that it seems advisable to
record it. To the work of reading or expression to which she was originally
called two classes in composition were added. The former teacher of
composition had bequeathed to the work as a text-book a rhetoric which
consisted of involved theory plus one hundred and twenty-five separate and
distinct rules for the use of words, and the teac