Excerpt from The Art of Singing
The art of singing, like other arts, has had its periods of development, culmination, and decay. The only period which concerns us here is that in which singing has been associated with the growth of modern music, and which may be said to date from the rise of the modern harmonic style in Italy in the 17th century. The art was then cultivated with great assiduity and success, and reached its highest point towards the middle and end of the 18th century, since which time the development of music in other directions, especially in relation to the orchestra, has led composers to a comparative neglect of the voice as an instrument to be studied on its own account. With the disappearance of that school of composition in which composers wrote specially for the voice, has likewise vanished, to a great extent, the successful cultivation of the art of singing.
The human voice will never cease to be the most beautiful of instruments when properly used; it will never cease to strike the chords of the heart with a directness and an intensity Unapproached by any other instrument. During the time of the greatest professors and artists of this branch of music in the last century, little, unhappily, was put into writing concerning their methods of teaching and practising the art; and in attempting to gather up the threads of their work, reliance is necessarily placed on the traditions which have come down to us, and on a few recorded maxims and sayings which are attached to the names of the great men of old time.
In this book the endeavour has been to gather together these traditions and hints and weld them into a consistent whole. The aim has not been to write anything new, but simply to make an intelligible and useful record of the old truths concerning our art.
Should the publication of this work result in bringing his fellow-professors of singing more generally to the discussion of vocal questions in a natural way - to the study of that which is absolutely known concerning the human voice, in place of debating those difficult physiological problems in relation to which there are few settled facts to go upon the author will feel that he has not laboured in vain.
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