01.:to..~·: first Let 1s examine two aspects of last Monday's rehearsal: in rhythm, and second -- approaches to choral reading t~chniques. It is the long-established custom of instrumentalists to make a distiction bet~een musicians (in which class they include themselves) and singers -- who may be taken seriously in terms of their own career and financial success, or dramatic ability or even physical opulence of sound -- but who, in general, in terms of "musicianship 11 are to be regarded as but little in advance of a trained animal act. · This attitude is not altogether without justification, for certainly the great singers of the past one hundred years are acclaimed not for the impeccable qualities of their musicianship, but for the sheer physical beauty ofn their voices. , Some of them may indeed have been fine musicians -_,;_but ·-that ~ .J is scarcely remembered, or even considered noteworthy. The great voices are) <._;V' infrequent enough to commandadulation whenever or wherever they appear. Now, if we take '~usicianshipn to mean sight-reading ability and a wide / acquaintance with repertoire, on the whole I should think we would have to admit that professional instrumentalists are generally in advance of professional singers; and there probably is a similar status with regard to their amateur counterparts. There are understandable reasons for this. In the first place very few instrumentalists arrive at a professional career who did not begin their study well before ten years of age, frequently at five or six. The finger and eye techniques acquired at this age are almost as naturally learned as those of reading words and adding sums. On the other 1 hand, the singer seldom discovers he has a voice until late in the teens; men frequently are in their twenties before the voice is sufficiently set physically to warrant beginning to study. It is scarcely surprising that singers should then be some years behind instrumentalists in sight reading or repertoire. While one would not reconnnend the exclusive study of voice, it still is ) tkue that the singer is faced with a lot to learn, rather late in life, about vocal technique; and if his attention is fixed almost excl-qsively upon vocal sound rather than upon music theo~!, i~ mai_~e regretted, _but i L i~ at leas t__.--understandable. /- - - 1--· c -r ···· ·-In the second place, / since the voice is not something one can approach with sight and touch, and manipulate to the limits of digital dexterity, it should not be maligned simply because it is not so facile an instrument as the piano, clarinet or violin. Excepting for those born with absolute pitch, sight-reading for the sing~ er is a complex business. It is not so simple as putting the next finger down. A good many of us, I suspect, could type sixty words a minute, -- but we wot.ld ha7e a devil of a time sight-singing the comparable ratio -of five notes per second. On the other hand, I have known two or three people · who could sightsing, using syllables, with very nearly this keyboard speed, -- and who made the most horrible sounds imaginable. It is a terribly difficult thing to sightread and produce a beautiful sound while so doing. There are a dozen additional reasons why it is difficult to be a satisfactory vocal "musician." They all have soma validity, and we are entitled to find comfort in them equal only to our determination not to be mastered by them. For, whatever the difficulties, the singer who finally masters his musical craft finds a _joy in music known only to a few of the very greatest instrumentalists.
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