DURING A PERFORMANCE tonight in the theatre to which our school is attached I was operating sound effects, and in the intermission I overheard a conversation between some actors and Tortsov in the wings.
Tortsov had made some comments to an actor on his performance, but unfortunately I missed these and the actor’s reply. When I began to listen the Director was relating some personal experiences. As is often his way he was teaching by means of these experiences and what he had concluded from them.
This is more or less the content of what he said:
“When I recited to myself I tried to speak as simply as possible, without false pathos, insincere tonal effects, or exaggerated emphasis in the verse. I tried to keep to the heart of the poem. The impression it produced was due to the fact that the words in a phrase vibrated, sang, and that lent my speech nobility and a musical quality.
“When I carried this way of speaking on to the stage my fellow actors were amazed at the change that took place in my voice, my diction and by my new way of expressing feeling and thoughts. Then it appeared that I had not yet solved all angles to the problem. The actor must not only be pleased himself by the sound of his own speech but he must also make it possible for the public present in the theatre to hear and understand whatever merits its attention. Words and their intonation should reach their ears without effort.
“This demands greats kill. When I acquired it I realized what we call the ‘feel of words’.
“Speech is music. The text of a part or a play is a melody, an opera, or a symphony. Pronunciation on the stage is as difficult an art as singing, it requires training and a technique bordering on virtuosity. When an actor with a well trained voice and masterly vocal technique speaks the words of his part I am quite carried away by his supreme art. If he is rhythmic I am involuntarily caught up in the rhythm and tone of his speech, I am stirred by it. If he himself pierces to the soul of the words in his part he takes me with him into the secret places of the playwright’s composition as well as into those of his own soul. When an actor adds the vivid ornament of sound to that living content of the words, he causes me to glimpse with an inner vision the images he has fashioned out of his own creative imagination.
“When an actor controls his movements and adds to them words and voice it seems to me it becomes an harmonious accompaniment to beautiful singing. A good man’s voice entering on the scene with its cue is like a ’cello or an oboe. A pure, high, woman’s voice, responding to the cue, makes me think of a violin or flute. The deep chest tones of a dramatic actress remind me of the introduction of a viola. The heavy bass of a noble father resounds like a bassoon, the voice of the villain is a trombone, which rumbles yet gurgles in wardly, as though from rage and accumulated saliva.
“How can actors fail to feel a whole orchestra in just a phrase, even a simple one of seven words such as, ‘Come back—I cannot live without you!’
“How many different ways that phrase can be sung, and each time anew! What a variety of meanings can be put into it! How many different moods! Try changing the places of the pauses and accents and you will obtain more and more new meanings. Short stops combined with accents set off the key word sharply and present it distinct from the others. Longer pauses, without sounds, make it possible to impregnate the words with fresh inner content. This is all helped by movements, facial expression and intonation. Such changes produce renewed moods, give new content to a whole phrase.
“Take as an example the first two words, Come back, followed by a pause filled with despair because he who has gone will not return. It is the beginning of a pathetic aria.
“I cannot—followed by a brief breathing pause which prepares and helps to enhance the key word—live—that is the high point. Obviously this is the most important word in the whole phrase. To make it stand out instill greater relief there is another short breathing pause, after which the phrase concludes with the words: without you.
“If the word live, for the sake of which the whole musical phrase was created, is something alive torn from the quick of a soul, if the woman who has been cast off clings in that word with all her remaining strength to the man to whom she has given herself for all eternity—then it will convey the core, the shattered spirit, of a woman who has been betrayed. But in case of need the pauses and accented words can be distributed quite differently, and this is what we get:
“Come back—pause—I (breath)cannot... (breath) ... live with-out you!
“This time the sharpness of outline is given to the two words: I cannot. Through them we feel a despairing woman for whom life has lost its meaning. This colours the whole phrase with an ominous significance and we seem to feel that this cast-off woman has reached the end, that a chasm is opening before her.
“Think how much can be packed into a word or a phrase, how rich language is. It is powerful, not in itself but inasmuch as it conveys the human soul, the human mind. Indeed there is so much spiritual, emotional content in those little words: Come back. I cannot live without you. In them lies the tragedy of a whole human life.
“Yet what is one phrase in the larger concept of the playwright, in a whole scene, act, play? Only a tiny speck, a moment, an insignificant part of a great whole.
“Just as atoms go to make up a whole universe, individual sounds convey words, words phrases, phrases thoughts, and out of thoughts there are formed whole scenes, acts and the content of a great play which embraces the tragic life of a human soul—of Hamlet, Othello, Hedda Gabler, Mme. Ranevskaya. These sounds form a whole symphony!"
“‘Stym ta’ope nwy dor t’yawn p’ness!’”
These were the unexpected sounds that issued from Tortsov’s lips as he came into class today. We looked at him and at each other in astonishment.
“Don’t you understand it?” he asked after a short wait.
“Not a word of it,” we admitted. “What do the scolding words mean?”
“‘It is time to open wide the door to your own happiness.’ The actor who pronounced them in a certain play had a good, big voice, audible in all parts of the theatre, nevertheless we could not understand them any better than you could, and we too thought, as you did, that he was scolding us,” explained Tortsov.
“The after effects of this slight and ludicrous example were so noteworthy for me that I must expand a little on what happened to me:
“After many years of acting and directing experience I arrived at a full realization, intellectual and emotional, that every actor must be in possession of excellent diction and pronunciation, that he must feel not only phrases and words, but also each syllable, each letter. The fact of the matter is that the simpler the truth the longer it takes to arrive at it.
“We do not feel our own language, the phrases, syllables, letters, and that is why it is so easy for us to distort it; instead of va we say fa, instead of ga we say kua. Add to this lisping, gutteral, nasal, and other ugly distortions of good speech!
“Words with substitute parts now look to me the way a man would who has an ear where his mouth should be, an eye in place of an ear, a finger for a nose.
“A word with a telescoped beginning is like a face with a bashed in nose. A word whose end is swallowed makes me think of a man minus a limb.
“The dropping of individual letters or syllables makes as glaring defects for me now as a missing eye or tooth, a cauliflower ear or any other physical deformity.
“When I hear someone, through inertia or slipshod habits, run all his words into an amorphous mass I cannot help thinking of a fly which has fallen into a jar of honey, or autumn weather when sleet and fog and mud blur everything.
“Lack of rhythm in speech, which makes a phrase start off slowly, spurt suddenly in the middle and just as abruptly slide in a gateway, reminds me of the way a drunkard walks, and the rapid fire speech of someone with St. Vitus’ dance.
“You have, of course, had occasion to read books or newspapers which were badly printed, with letters missing and various misprints. Doesn’t it torture you to have to take the time to guess at and solve the riddles such printing presents?
“And here is another form of torture: reading letters written the way one spreads grease on a surface. Just try to guess who is inviting you to do what, go where and when. Sometimes it is quite impossible. They write: ‘You d...d...’ What they think you are, a dumb-bell or a darling, a friend or a fool—you cannot decipher.
“Difficult as it may be to have to deal with a badly printed book or poor handwriting, you still can reach, if you try hard enough, some understanding of the thought behind the words. The printed or written matter lies before you; you can take the time to go over it again and again and unriddle the incomprehensible.
“But what recourse have you in the theatre when the actors pronounce the text in a fashion comparable to your badly printed book, when they drop out whole letters, words, phrases which are of ten of cardinal importance to the basic structure of the play? You cannot bring back the spoken word, the play plunges forward towards its denouement, leaving you no time to stop and puzzle out what you do not understand. Poor speech creates one misunderstanding after another. It clutters up, befogs, or even conceals the thought, the essence and even the very plot of the play. The audience will, in the beginning, strain their ears, attention, minds, so as not to miss anything that is going on on the stage; if they cannot follow they begin to fidget, fuss, whisper to each other and finally to cough.
“Do you realize the dire implication for an actor of that word cough? An audience of a thousand people which reaches the point of losing its patience and is deprived of contact with what is happening on the stage, can cough the actors, the play, the whole performance, out of the theatre. This spells ruin for the play and the performance. One of the means of guarding against such an eventuality is the use of clear, beautiful, vivid speech.
“One more thing I came to understand: whereas distortion of our conversational speech may be half-way condoned in the surroundings of our home, any such coarse grained way of talking carried on to the stage, and used to pronounce melodious verse on exalted topics, on freedom, ideals, pure love—is offensive and ridiculous. Letters, syllables, words were not invented by man, they were suggested to him by his instincts, impulses, by nature herself, time and place.
“It was only after I had realized that letters are only symbols of sounds, which require the carrying out of their content, that I found myself naturally confronted with the problem of learning these sound forms so that I should be better able to fill out their content.
“I consciously went back to the beginning of the alphabet and began to study each letter separately. I found it easier to make a start with the vowels because they had been well trained, straightened and smoothed out by singing.”
“Do you realize that an inner feeling is released through the clear sound of the A? That sound is bound up with certain deep inner experiences which seek release and easily float out from the recesses of one’s bosom.
“But there is another A sound. It is dull, muffled, does not float out easily but remains inside to rumble ominously, as if in some cavern or vault. There is also the insidious A A A which whirls out to drill its way into the person who hears it. The joyous A sound rises from one like a rocket, in contrast to the ponderous A, which, like an iron weight sinks in to the bottom of one’s wellsprings.
“Do you not sense that particles of you are carried out on these vocal waves? These are not empty vowels; they have a spiritual content.
“That is what I came to realize about the sound forms of vowels and then I went on to the study of consonants.
“These sounds had not been corrected and polished for me by my training in singing so that my work on them proved to be complicated. In his book The Expressive Word S. M. Volkonski says, ‘If vowels are a river and consonants are the banks, it is necessary to reinforce the latter lest there be floods!’
“In addition to this directing function consonants possess qualities of sonority.
“The most sonorous of them are M, N, L, R, V, Z, N, G, TH (voiced); and there are the stop consonants B, D, G, W.
“It was with these that I began my research.
“In these sounds you clearly distinguish which tones are almost those of vowels. The difference lies only in that they do not come out unimpeded, but are held in by pressures at various points, which give them their peculiar colouring. When the pressure which has blocked the tonal accumulation breaks, the sound rushes out. An example of this is the letter B: the accumulated booming is held in by your closed lips, which give it its character. With the stop removed an explosion occurs and the sound issues forth freely. There is a genuine basis for calling such sounds stop consonants.
“In the pronunciation of a B the explosion takes place immediately and abruptly, the accumulated breath and voice comes out instantly and rapidly. In pronouncing the consonants M, N, and L the same process occurs in modified, more delicate form, with a slight delay when the lips are opened (for the M) or the tongue touches the gums of the upper teeth(for the N and L).
“There are other consonants which do not have tone but are drawn out. This group includes the surds, the sounds of F and S.
"In addition there are, as you know, the explosive consonants P, T, K. They drop abruptly, like the blows of a hammer. But they also push out the vowel sounds that are behind them.
“When these sounds are combined to create syllables, words and phrases, their vocal form, naturally, becomes more capacious so that we can pack more content into it. Pronounce, for instance, the first two letters of the alphabet A and B together but in reverse.”
Good heavens, I thought to myself, do we have to begin all over again to learn the alphabet? We must be going through our second childhood, the artistic one this time.
BaBaBa ... we all started off in a chorus like a herd of sheep.
“See here,” said Tortsov cutting us off short.“I must have a different sound, open, distinct, broad—Ba-a-a—one that will convey surprise, joy, buoyant greeting, something to make my heart beat with greater strength and gaiety. Listen: Ba. You feel how way down inside me a booming B has come to life, how my lips can hardly stem the force of the sound, how the obstacle is broken through and from my opened lips, as from outstretched arms or the doors of an hospitable home, there emerges to meet you, like a host greeting a dear guest, a broad, generous A, exuding welcoming spirit. If you were to reproduce my exclamation on paper you would put down something like this:g-m-B-A-a. Don’t you get from this exclamation a piece of me which has flown out towards you along with the joyous sound?
“And now here is the same B A syllable, but in an entirely different character.”
Tortsov pronounced the sounds in a gloomy, dull, depressed way. This time the boom of the B was like an underground rumble presaging an earthquake. His lips did not open like a welcome; they parted slowly, almost as if in perplexity. Even the A sound was not joyous, as it was the first time; it came out dully, without resonance, almost as if it had fallen back without achieving liberation. In its stead there issued from his lips a slightly rustling breath, like a vapour from a large open vessel.
“There is a host of variations you can invent for this syllable of the two letters B A and in each of them there will be manifest a small bit drawn from a human soul. Sounds and syllables like this have life on the stage, but those which produce a wilted, inanimate, mechanical pronunciation are like corpses, they suggest not life but the grave.
“Now try developing the syllable to include three letters: bar, ban, bat, bag. With each additional letter the mood changes, each new consonant attracts new little bits of our being from out of this or that recess of our inner selves. If the number of letters is now increased to make two syllables the capacity for emotional expression is again enlarged: Baba, babu, bana, banu, balu, bali, barbar, banyan, batman, bagrag....”
We went over the sounds with which we ended the last class with Tortsov and then began to invent our own. It was probably the first time in my life that I really listened to the sounds of letters. I grasped how imperfect they were in our mouths and how full they were in Tortsov’s. He was like a phonetics gourmet, enjoying the aroma of each syllable and sound.
The whole room was filled with a variety of noises, wrestling with each other, upsetting each other, but we did not achieve any resonance for all our ardent zeal. In contrast to our dull croaking of vowels and barking of consonants, Tortsov’s singing vowels and resounding consonants seemed so bright, sonorous, vibrating through all parts of the room.
How simple and yet how difficult this problem is, I thought to myself. The simpler and more natural it is, the harder it seems.
I watched Tortsov’s face. It was beaming like the face of a man who finds sounds delectable and enjoys their beauty. Then I looked at my fellow students and I all but laughed out loud to see their gloomy, unbending facial expressions, bordering on ridiculous grimaces.
The sounds which Tortsov produced gave pleasure both to him and to us, who heard him. Whereas the harsh and grating noises which we forced out of ourselves caused nothing but great distress to us and our listeners.
Tortsov was now happily in the saddle and riding a pet hobby, he revelled in syllables which he joined into words with which we were familiar, or which he made up. Out of these words he made up phrases, he spoke a kind of monologue, then he went back to individual sounds and syllables building them once more into words.
While he was relishing the sounds I kept my eyes on his lips. They made me think of the carefully adjusted valves of a brass wind instrument; as they opened or closed no air was lost in any cracks. Thanks to this mathematically precise structure the sounds he produced were exceptionally clear cut and pure. With an instrument of speech as perfect as the one Tortsov had worked out for himself, the articulation of the lips operates with incredible lightness, speed and accuracy.
This is not true of my own. My lips, like the valves in a cheaply and badly made instrument, do not close with sufficient firmness. They let air escape, they are poorly adjusted. As a consequence my consonants do not have the requisite clarity and purity.
The articulation of my lips is so poorly developed and so far from any standard of virtuosity, that it does not even admit of rapid speech. Syllables and words run into, tumble and sprawl over one another, like the eroding bank of a stream. This results in the constant overflow of vowels and the tangling up of the tongue.
“The famous singer and teacher, Pauline Viardot,” Tortsov said, “used to tell her pupils that they must sing with the front of the lips.
“Therefore work hard at the development of your articulation of lips, tongue and all the parts which contribute to the production of well cut and shaped consonants.
“I shall not enter here into the details of this work. You will have your drill for this.”
Today Tortsov came into class with a lady on his arm, Madame Zarembo. They stood side by side in the middle of the room, with a bright smile on their faces.
“Congratulate us,” announced Tortsov,“we have formed...an alliance.”
The students naturally thought he was speaking of marriage. Then he went on:
“From now on Madame Zarembo is going to help place your voices with relation to vowels and consonants. And I, or someone in my stead, will simultaneously correct your pronunciation.
“Vowels will not require my interference because singing will naturally set them right. But consonants must be worked on both in singing and speech.
“Unfortunately there are those vocalists who have little interest in words in general and consonants in particular. And there are also teachers of diction who do not always have a very clear grasp of tone production. Consequently singers’ voices are often properly placed for vowels and improperly for consonants, whereas in the products of diction teachers the contrary may be true with the consonants over pronounced and the vowels slighted.
“Under such circumstances lessons in singing and enunciation can simultaneously do both good and harm. Such a situation is not normal and the blame for it can often be laid to regrettable prejudice. The fact is that the work of voice placing consists primarily in the development of breathing and the vibration of the sustained notes. It is often held that only vowels can be sustained. But do not some consonants also possess this quality? Why should they not be developed to be as vibrant as the vowels?
“How good it would be if the teachers of singing simultaneously taught diction, and teachers of diction taught singing! But since this is impossible let us have specialists in the two fields working with each other.
“So Madame Zarembo and I decided to try an experiment.
“I am unwilling to countenance the usual theatrical declamatory intoning. That can be left to those whose voices do not of their own accord sing.
“To make them resounding these persons are obliged to resort to vocal twists and tricks, to theatrical, declamatory pyrotechnics. For example, to make an impression of solemnity they drop their voice down and down in intervals of seconds. Or, to relieve monotony they screech individual notes out an octave higher, but the rest of the time, because they possess such a narrow diapason, they pound along in a semi-monotone.
“If these actors would let the sounds sing for themselves would they need to resort to such devious methods?
“Yet good voices in conversational speech are rare. If one does meet them they often lack power and range. Without range a voice cannot possibly project the full life of a human being.
“When Tommaso Salvini, the great Italian actor, was asked what one must have to be a tragedian he replied:‘Voice, voice, and more voice!’ For the time being I cannot explain and you cannot yet grasp in full measure the implications of that point made by Salvini and many others. You will only comprehend with your feelings as well as your mind the essential meaning of these words in your own practice, your own experience. When you sense the possibilities opened up to you by a well-placed voice, capable of exercising its naturally predestined functions, the saying of Salvini will reveal to you its deep significance.”
“To be‘in good voice’ is a blessing not only to a prima donna but also to the dramatic artist. To have the feeling that you have the power to direct your sounds, command their obedience, know that they will forcibly convey the minutest details, modulations, shadings of your creativeness!
“‘Not in good voice’—what a torture that is for singer and actor! To feel that you do not control your sounds, that they will not reach the hall packed with listeners! Not to be able to express what your inner creative being dictates to you so vividly and so profoundly. Only the artist himself knows these tortures. Only he can tell what has been finally forged in the furnace of his inner being, and how it must be conveyed by voice and word. If his voice cracks the actor is shamed because what he has created inside himself is mutilated in its external form.
“There are actors whose normal state is not ‘in voice’. As a result they speak hoarsely, thereby deforming what they are conveying. Yet their souls are meanwhile full of beautiful music. Imagine a mute conveying his tender, poetic feelings to a beloved woman. Instead of a voice he has a repulsive, rasping bark. He deforms the thing that is beautiful and dear within him. This deforming puts him into a state of despair. The same is true of an actor capable of fine feelings but possessing a poor vocal apparatus.
“It also happens frequently that an actor may be endowed by nature with a voice of lovely timbre, flexible in powers of expression yet insignificant in volume so that it cannot be heard beyond the fifth row in the orchestra. Those in the very front row can manage to enjoy the enchanting timbre of his sounds, his expressive diction and beautifully developed speech. But what of those in the rows farther back? That part of the audience is doomed to boredom. They begin to cough, no one can hear anything and the actor can scarcely continue. He is obliged to force his beautiful voice and this violence does harm not only to his sounds, his pronunciation, his diction, but also to emotional experience in his part.
“Consider too those with voices which are easily audible through-out the theatre in the highest or lowest registers but absolutely non-existent in the middle register. Some of these are tempted to rise until they are strained and squeak, the others sink until they rumble around in the depths. Any forcing ruins the timbre of a voice and a range of five notes restricts all expressiveness.
“Another distressing thing is an actor’s voice excellent in all other respects, with volume, flexibility, expressiveness, capable of conveying all the shadings and intricacies of the inner pattern of a role, yet still suffering from one vital shortcoming: the timbre is disagreeable. If the ears and hearts of the public are closed to him, of what avail is the volume, flexibility and expressiveness of his voice?
“It can happen that these deficiencies are not subject to remedy, because of some inherent idiosyncrasy, or because of some vocal defect due to illness. Most frequently, however, the shortcomings I have mentioned can be corrected by the proper placing of sounds, the getting rid of pressures, tensions, forcing, wrong breathing and articulation of the lips or, finally they can be cured if they have been caused by illness.
“The conclusion to be reached is that even a good natural voice should be developed not only for singing but also for speech.
“What is the work to be? Is it the same as that required for the opera, or does the theatre make quite different demands?
“Some assert that they are quite different. For conversational purposes one must have open sounds but, and here I speak from experience, such broadness of voice tends to become vulgar, colourless, diffuse and above all it frequently mounts in tone—all of which is detrimental to speech on the stage.
“What nonsense, protest others. In conversation sounds should be condensed and closed.
“Yet my experience has been that this leads to a constrained, muffled voice with a small range. It sounds as though it were in a barrel, instead of flying out the sounds drop to the ground at the very feet of the speaker.
“What then should we do?
“Instead of answering this I shall tell you about my own work on sounds and diction in the course of my acting career.
“When I was young I prepared myself to be an opera singer,” Tortsov began his story.
“Thanks to this I have a certain knowledge of the usual methods of placing the breath and sound for purposes of singing. I do not need it for singing itself but to help me search out the best methods for evolving a natural, beautiful, pregnant speech. Its function is to convey through words either the exalted feelings in the tragic style or the simple, intimate, gracious speech of drama and comedy. My research has been forwarded by the circumstance of my having worked a great deal these last years in the field of opera. Coming into contact with singers, I have talked with them on the subject of vocal art, I have listened to the sounds of well-placed voices, I have met with the most varied assortment of timbres, learned to distinguish between throat, nose, head, chest, occipital, laryngeal and other shadings of tone. All this has registered on my aural memory. But the main thing is that I came to understand the advantage of voices placed ‘in the mask’, where the hard palate, nasal cavities, antrims and other chambers of resonance are situated.
“The singers said to me: ‘A sound which is laid against the teeth or is driven against the bone, that is, the skull, acquires a ring and power,’ sounds which, by contrast, fall against the soft parts of the palate or the glottis, vibrate as though muffled with cotton.
“Another singer said to me:‘I place my sounds when I sing exactly the way a sick or sleeping person does when he sighs, with a closed mouth. By thus directing the sound to the front of my face, into the nasal cavity, I open my mouth and continue to make the mooing sound as before. But now the previous sigh turns into a sound, freely emitted and resonant as it detonates against the nasal cavities and other sounding boards of the facial mask.’
“I have tried out all these methods in my own experience so that I might discover the character of the sound of which I have been dreaming.”
“Accidental occurrences also helped guide me along the way. One example of this was my acquaintance while abroad with a famous Italian singer. One day he was under the impression that his voice was not properly vibrant and that he would be unable to sing in his concert that evening. The poor fellow begged me to go along with him and show him how to act in case things went wrong. His hands were icy, his face was pale, he was distraught as he stepped on to the concert platform and began to sing magnificently. After the first number he came into the wings and executed an entrechat for sheer joy, singing under his breath:
“‘It arrived, it arrived, it arrived!’
“‘What was it that arrived?’ I asked in astonishment.
“‘It—the note!’ he repeated as he picked up the music for his next number.
“‘Where did it arrive?’ I was still mystified.
“‘It arrived here,’ said the singer, pointing to the forefront of his face, his nose, his lips.
“On another occasion I chanced to be present at a concert given by the pupils of a well-known singing teacher, and to sit next to her. This gave me the opportunity to witness at close range her excitement over her charges. The old lady kept clutching my arm, or nervously nudging me with her elbow or knee, whenever one of them did something amiss. Meantime she kept repeating with anguish the words:
“‘It’s gone, gone,’ or else joyously whispering: ‘It’s come, it’s come!’
“‘What has gone where?’ I asked in bewilderment.
“‘The note has gone into the back of his head,’ she said in a frightened voice in my ear, or else she repeated happily:
“‘It’s come, it’s come back to his mouth’ (she meant the front of his face, the mask).
“I remembered these two incidents and the words ‘it’ scome, it’s gone...into the mask, into the back of his head,’ and tried to find out why it was so terrifying to singers when the note disappears into the back of their heads, or why such cause for rejoicing when it comes forward into the facial mask.
“To ferret this out, I had to work on singing. But as I feared to disturb the other people living in my home I practiced in a low voice and with my mouth closed. This tact on my part bore abundant fruit. It turned out that at first when one is placing a sound it is best to hum softly until one finds the right support for the voice.
“In the beginning I held only one, two, or three notes in the middle register, basing them on the various resonant parts of my facial mask which I could feel out inside it. At times it seemed as though the sound had reached the very spot it should reach, and at others I realized that it had ‘gone’.
“Finally after a long period of exercises I established a way of placing two or three notes where they seemed to me to sound quite differently—they were full, compact, ringing, all qualities I had noticed in myself before. But I did not stop there. I decided to bring the sound out into the open in such a way that the very end of my nose would quiver with the vibrations from it.
“I was able to do this except that then my voice became quite nasal. This obliged me to undertake a whole new series of exercises in order to rid it of the nasal effect. I worked on it for a long time, although in the end the secret of the trouble turned out to be very simple. All that had to be done was to remove a small, scarcely perceptible tension in the inner part of the nasal cavity where I was able to sense a slight pressure.
“At last I was able to free myself of that pressure. The notes would come out and be even more powerful than before, but the voice was not as agreeable in timbre as I wished. It still bore traces of an undesirable preliminary sound of which I could not rid myself. Stubbornly bornly I refused to put the tone back and down in my throat, in the hope that in time I should conquer this fresh obstacle.
“In the next stage of my search I attempted to increase the range I had fixed for my exercises. To my astonishment the middle notes, as well as those in the higher and lower registers sounded beautiful of their own accord and equalled in character the first ones I had worked out.
“So, gradually, I checked over and smoothed out the discrepancies among the naturally open notes of my range. The next task was to work on the most difficult of all, the borderline, highest notes, which, as everyone knows, require an artificially placed, closed tone.
“‘If you are looking for something, don’t go sit on the seashore and expect it to come and find you; you must search, search, search with all the stubbornness in you!’ That is why I used every free moment at home to ‘moo’, feeling out new resonances, new points of support, constantly adapting myself to them.
“During the period of searching I accidentally noticed that whenever I was trying to bring the sounds forward into my facial mask I tipped my head forward and dropped my chin. This position facilitated the emission of the sound as far forward as possible. Many singers recognize this method and approve of it.
“In this way I worked out a whole scale of high top notes. At first this was accomplished only with my mouth closed, by mooing them and not with real voice and an open mouth.
“Spring came. My family moved to the country and I remained alone in the apartment. This made it possible for me to do my mooing exercises now with an open as well as a closed mouth. The first day after the family left I came home to dinner, as usual stretched myself out on a divan and began, as had been my habit, to ‘moo’. For the first time, after an interval of a whole year, I risked opening my mouth on a note well-placed with it shut.
“What was my astonishment when suddenly, most unexpectedly, out of my nose and mouth there floated a long-since matured tone, one I had never known before yet had always dreamed of, a tone I had heard in singers and had long been seeking to produce myself.
“When I increased my voice it was stronger and more substantial. I had never known myself to be capable of such a tone. It seemed as though some miracle had taken place in me. I was so carried away I sang all evening and my voice not only did not tire, it sounded better all the time.
“It used to be, before I did these systematic exercises, that I would get hoarse from singing loud and long. Now, by contrast, this seemed to have a beneficial, cleansing effect on my throat.
“There was still another pleasant surprise in store for me: I was able to produce notes which up to now had not been within my range. New colouring appeared in my voice, a different timbre which seemed to me to be better, finer, more velvety than before.
“How had all this come about of its own accord? It was clear that with the help of the low mooing sounds it had been possible not only to develop a tone but also to equalize all vowel sounds. This is so important.
“With this newly placed voice I had developed, the open sounds of the vowels were all directed to the same spot, in the upper hard palate at the very roots of the teeth and they reverberated from there into the nasal cavities in the forefront of the facial mask.
“Later tests showed that the higher the voice went, moving into the artificially closed note range, the farther forward the points of support moved up into the nasal cavities.
“Besides this I noticed that at the same time as my naturally open notes supported themselves against my hard palate and reverberated in the nasal cavities, the closed notes, supported in the nasal cavities reverberated against my hard palate.
“For evenings on end I sang away in my deserted apartment, enchanted with my new voice. But it was not long before my self-satisfaction was punctured. At an opera rehearsal I heard a well-known conductor criticize a singer because he pushed his tones too far forward and produced, as a result, a kind of gypsy twang.
“This incident destroyed the position I had thought so solid under my feet. It was true that I used to notice that unpleasant nasal quality in my own voice when it was placed in the forefront of my facial mask.
“So a fresh search had to be undertaken.
“Without abandoning my discoveries I began to explore my head for new reverberant surfaces at every point of my hard palate, soft palate, the top and even the back of my head, which I had been taught to be so afraid of, and everywhere I found new sounding boards. Each one contributed in some degree or other and added new colourings to enhance the tone. And incidentally I learned to control the ‘gypsy twang’.
“These tests convinced me that the technique of singing is far more complex and subtle than I had thought, and that the secret of the art is not contained only in the mask.
“There was one other secret I was fortunate enough to uncover. In the singing classes I attended I was struck by the teacher’s frequent exhortations to the pupils working on high notes: ‘Yawn!’ he would say.
“It appeared that in order to release tension on a high note the throat and jaw must be put in exactly the same position as when one yawns. When this occurs the throat naturally spreads and the undesirable tension disappears. Thanks to this new secret my upper notes filled out, the pressure was relieved and they acquired a ring to their tone. This made me very happy.”
At our very next lesson Tortsov continued the story of his research:
“As a result of the various attempts I have described I succeeded in achieving a voice which was correctly placed for vowels. I could do my vocalizing on them and my voice sounded even, strong and full in all registers.
“From that I started on songs but, to my surprise, they all turned into vocalizing exercises because I was singing only the vowels.
“The consonants were not only left without sound, they also impeded my singing with their dry clatter. It was then that I remembered S. M. Volkonski’s aphorism to the effect that ‘Vowels are rivers, consonants their banks’. That was why my singing with its shaky consonants was like a river without banks overflowing into marshy depths that sucked in and drowned the words.
“After that my attention was centred only on consonants. I watched the handling of them in myself and in others, I listened to singers in operas and concerts. What did I learn? It appeared that even the best of them experienced what had happened to me. Their arias and songs could turn into sheer vocalizing because of the limpness of consonants, not fully or else carelessly produced.
“I realized even more forcibly than ever what my problem was after I heard that the voice of a certain famous Italian baritone sounded weak when he did his vocalizations on vowels, and it was only when he added consonants that the volume increased tenfold. I tried to prove this by my own experience, but for a long time the desired results were not forthcoming.
“More than that, the attempt convinced me that my consonants, whether separately or in combination with vowels, had no tone in them. It cost me a tremendous amount of work to sound absolutely every letter.
“I spent my evenings practising various sounds or singing them. Nor did I have a successful time with all of them. I was particularly unsuccessful with the sibilant and ‘roaring’ sounds. Evidently there was an innate defect in me to which I was obliged to adapt myself.
“The first thing to be learned was the proper position of mouth, lips and tongue for the correct creation of consonant sounds.
“For this purpose I enlisted the help of one of my students who possessed an excellent natural diction.
“He proved to be a very patient fellow. This fact enabled me to watch his mouth for hours on end, making a note of what he did with his lips, his tongue, when he pronounced vowels that I had recognized as incorrect.
“I realized, of course, that there could never be any question of two people speaking in an identical manner. Each one is bound to adapt his speech in one way or another to his peculiar gifts.
“Nevertheless I did try to carry over to my own enunciation what I had noted in that of my patient student. But there is a limit to all endurance, and he made various excuses for not coming to me any more. This forced me to turn to an experienced diction teacher for instruction, with whom I made new advances.
“I did not have time to enjoy this success before I was again disappointed. What happened was that the opera students with whom I had been working became the target for the harshest kind of criticism on the part of other singers and musicians, who claimed that in their emphasis on consonants they produced not one but several each time. They were right. As a result the sounding of the consonants detracted from the vowels, and the whole enunciation became absurd.
“I had been so absorbed in singing that I forgot the principal object of my search, speech on the stage and methods of declaiming.
“Recalling what I was looking for I tried to speak the way I had learned to sing. To my surprise the sounds slipped into the back of my head and I was utterly unable to drag them forward to my mask. When finally I did learn to use the mask in speaking my speech became quite unnatural.
“What could this mean? I kept asking myself in bewilderment. Evidently one must not speak the way one sings. No wonder professional singers try always to sing differently from the way they speak.
“My questions on this subject brought out the fact that many vocalists do this so as not to wear out the timbre of their singing tone by use in ordinary speech.
“Yet for us actors, I decided, this is a bad precaution since our very purpose in singing is to enable us to speak with timbre in our voices.
“I was hard at work over this question when a famous foreign actor, celebrated for his diction and the emotional impact of his voice said to me, ‘Once your voice is properly placed you should speak exactly the way you sing.’
“After that my experiments acquired a definite direction and moved ahead at high speed. Singing alternated with speech; I would sing for fifteen minutes, speak for the same length of time; then sing again and speak again. I continued this practice for a long time, but without the desired results.
“This was not surprising, I concluded, because what could these few hours of proper speech do for me in contrast to the many hours of incorrect speech? Correct speech had to be put into constant use, formed into a habit, introduced into my own life, made second nature.
“Your lessons in singing are given you students not merely as exercises to place voices for that particular hour. During the class you are supposed to learn the things that are to be practiced first under the eye of an experienced coach and then independently, at home and everywhere else you go during the day.
“Until this new method has completely possessed us we cannot consider that we have really assimilated it. We must be constantly on guard to see that we speak correctly and beautifully at all times, in or out of the theatre. That is the only condition under which we can make it second nature, so that we do not have to distract our attention to our diction when we are about to step on the stage.
“If the person who is to play Hamlet is obliged as he enters his scenes to think about his deficiencies in voice and speech, there is little likelihood of his being able to carry out his main creative undertaking. Therefore I advise you to fulfil once and for all the elementary requirements of diction and sound. As for the subtleties of the art of speech, which will enable you to convey with skill and beauty all the intangible shadings of thoughts and feelings—that is something you will have to work on all your life.
“As you have noticed, I was continuing my search long after my student days were over. It was not at all easy for me to accomplish all this, but I did as much as I could for as long as my attention held out.
“There were periods when I watched my voice all of the time. I turned my days into one continuous lesson and in that way was able to shake off incorrect speech habits.
“In the end I did feel that a change came about in my ordinary way of speaking. There were certain individual sounds that came off well, even whole phrases, and I realized just then that I was applying to my conversational speech the things I had learned in singing. I spoke just as I sang. The disappointing part of it was that this happened only at brief intervals because my sounds tended always to recede to the soft surfaces of my palate and throat.
“Up to the present this state of things still obtains. I am not sure that I shall succeed in keeping my speaking voice as flexible as my singing one. Obviously I shall be obliged to set it aright by means of preliminary exercises just before a rehearsal or a performance.
“Nevertheless there could be no doubt about the general success I had achieved. I learned to carry my voice forward into the mask at will, quickly and easily at any time, not only when I sang but when I spoke.
“The principal result of my work, however, was that in speech I acquired the same unbroken line of sound as I had evolved in singing and without which there can be no true art of the word.
“This is what I had been searching for so long, what I had dreamed of. It is what lends a quality of beauty and music not only to common conversational speech but also and especially to elevated poetry.
“I had learned in my own practise that this unbroken line emerges only when the vowels and the consonants ring of their own accord the way they do in singing. If only the vowel sounds are sustained, and the consonants merely bang along after them, all one gets is a chasm, a break, a vacuum; instead of an unbroken line one has sound shreds. I soon realized that not only the stop consonants but the others too—the sibilant, the whistling, the tinkling, the hushing and hawking, the raucous consonants must also participate in and contribute their reverberations and sounds to the creation of the unbroken line.
“Now my conversational speech sings, hums, buzzes, or even roars, as it builds a constant line, and changes the tones and colours of its sounds according to the vowels and the vibrating or sibilant consonants.
“At the end of this period of work which I have described to you at length, I had not yet reached the point of acquiring a sense of words, or a sense of phrase, but there was no doubt that I could distinguish among the sounds of syllables.
“There are specialists in this field who will not hesitate to criticize loud and long the path I pursued in my researches and the results I achieved. Let them do it. My method has been taken from practice, from actual experience and my results are available for investigation.
“This sort of criticism will help stir up the whole question of how to place a voice for the stage and the methods of teaching it, as well as the question of correct diction and the production of sounds, syllables and words.
“After what I told you at our last lesson I believe you can be considered sufficiently prepared to begin responsible work on sound placing, on diction for singing and stage speech.
“It is necessary to make a start on this work now while you are still in school.
“An actor, when he appears on the stage, should be fully armed and his voice is an important item in his creative implementation. Moreover when you become professional actors a false self esteem may prevent you from working like a pupil who is learning his alphabet. So make the most of your youth and your years of schooling. If you do not carry out this training now you will not do so in the future, and at all points in your creative career on the stage the lack of it will act as a brake on your work. Your voice will be a powerful hindrance to you and not of any help. ‘My voice—is my fortune,’ said one famous actor at a dinner in his honour, as he plunged his pocket thermometer into his soup, his wine and other liquid refreshments. Out of concern for his voice he felt impelled to watch the temperatures of every thing he put in his mouth. This shows how much he cared about one of the greatest gifts of a creative nature—a beautiful, vibrant, expressive and powerful voice.”
At this point Rakhmanov introduced us to our new diction teacher. After a slight intermission he and Madame Zarembo gave us their first joint lesson.
I have asked myself whether I shall keep a record of these classes and I think not. Everything said and done is common practice in other schools and conservatories. The only difference is that our diction is corrected on the spot and under the double supervision of both teachers. These corrections are immediately carried into our singing exercises under the direction of the singing teacher. And at the same time the singing strictures are immediately carried over into our conversational speech.