TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 252, 24 October 1931, Page 7 (Supplement)

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN.

Mr. George Dodcls, the well-known singing teacher, made some pungent remarks on "wobbly" voices during his lecture at the summer course in music teaching at Oxford on August 2. "We are still suffering from a very bad attack of wobble in this country," he said. "We get singers who sing with a constant oscillation. You. have only to listen to the wireless to hear these wobbly singers. One of the sad things is that people in outlying districts hear these wireless wobblers and. think it is the thing to do. So they try to imitate them. They think that if they cannot wobble they are not putting song into their singing. They think it is emotion, whereas, of course, it is instability. Ihave even had some of these misguided listeners come and ask me to teach them to wobble like the singers on the wireless. As regards breathing, this ordinarily should be done through the nose. You do not easily take cold or chill with nose-breathing, whereas you do with mouth-breathing. But, of course, you must breathe through your mouth to sing. For one thing, breathing hard through your nose makes a noise, and you cannot be continually sniffing if you are singing a pathetic song. Even though it may mark the phrasing well, it does not tend to increase the poetry. People differ vocally as in any other way. Physically* mouths differ just as much as noses, chins, or eyes, and the shape of the tongue varies almost more than anything. Therefore it is wrong to think that an cxercise good for oue person is good for another. You must treat differently, for instance, a singer with what I call a woof-woof voice, all thick and woolly, and the singer with a meat-can voice, all hard and tinny. What really matters is quality, not quantity. Singers should remember that it is necessary always to show their top teeth, because the roof of their mouth is the soundingboard, and even though it may look prettier to have a nice little fringe of lip over the top teeth it is- hopeless from the sound point of view, since he sound gets stopped by the lip instead of singing out through the teeth."