Excerpts from textbooks on the Art of Vocal Rendition

W. B. Yeats, LITERATURE AND THE LIVING VOICE (1906)

Everyone who has to interest his audience through the voice discovers that his success depends upon the clear, simple and varied structure of his thought.

The reciter cannot be an actor, for that is a different art; but he must be a messenger, and he should be as interesting, as exciting, as are all that carry great news. His art is nearer to pattern than that of the actor; it is always allusion, never illusion; for what he tells of, no matter how impassioned he may become, is always distant; and for this reason he may permit himself every kind of nobleness.

If we accomplish this great work, if we make it possible again for the poet to express himself, not merely through words but through the voices of readers, we shall certainly have changed the substance and the manner of our poetry.
I owe to Chaucer many truths, but I would add to those truths the certainty that all the old writers wrote to be spoken or to be sung, and in a later age to be read aloud, for hearers who had to understand swiftly or not at all, and who gave up nothing of life to listen, but sat, the day's work over, friend by friend, lover by lover.

W.B. Yeats, SPEAKING TO THE PSALTERY (1902)

I have just heard a poem spoken with so delicate a sense of its rhythm, with so perfect a respect for its meaning, that if I were a wise man and could persuade a few people to learn the art I would never open a book of verses again.

Whenever one finds a fine verse one wants to read it to somebody, and it would be much less trouble and much pleasanter if we could all listen, friend by friend, lover by beloved. Images used to rise up before me, as I am sure they have arisen before nearly everybody else who cares for poetry, of wild-eyed men speaking harmoniously to murmuring wires while audiences in many-colored robes listened, hushed and excited.

But this new art, new in modern life I mean, will have to train its hearers as well as its speakers, for it takes time to surrender gladly the acting one is accustomed to, but we may well find mere monotony at first where we soon learns to find a variety as incalculable as in the outline of faces or in the expression of eyes.

I'm certain that, if people would listen for a while to lyrical verse spoken to notes, they would soon find it impossible to listen without indignation to verse as it is spoken in our leading theaters. They would get a subtlety of hearing that would demand new effects from actors and even from public speakers, and they might, it may be, begin even to notice one another's voices till poetry and rhythm and come nearer to common life.

Thomas Sheridan, LECTURES ON THE ART OF READING (1787)

Everyone who understands what he reads cannot fail to find out each emphatic word; and his business then is to mark it properly, not by stress only, as in accented syllables, but by a change of note, suited to the matter, which constitutes the essence of emphasis.

The tones of the voice are unerring signs, fixed to such internal feelings by the hand of Nature, common to all men, universally intelligible. It is in the proper use of these tones chiefly, that the life, spirit, grace, and harmony of spoken delivery consist.

As it is certain that Nature directs everyone in the right use of emphasis when they utter their own immediate feelings, they will have the same unerring rule to guide them in uttering the words of others after they have been written down: "How should I utter this, were I speaking it as my own immediate thoughts?"

By the use of accent and emphasis, words and their meaning, being pointed out by certain marks at the same time as they are uttered, the hearer has all trouble saved except but that of listening; and can accompany the speaker at the same pace that he goes, with as clear a comprehension of the matter offered to his consideration, as the speaker himself has, if he delivers himself well.

Alfred Ayres, THE ESSENTIALS OF ELOCUTION (1897)

Elocution is the art of speaking language so as to make the thought it expresses clear and impressive.

All that is necessary in order to read well, is to speak naturally. But naturalness of all things is the most difficult to attain. Any one that can draw at all can draw something that would be readily recognized as an attempt to draw the human figure, but to draw the human figure so that it is true to Nature one must be a superb artist.

Natural reading is best done by speaking the language as we should speak it if the thought were our own, and the language came to us as we give it utterance. Anyone who understands and appreciates an author will instinctively know what tones to read him in; a technical knowledge of gutturals and basilars, of pitches and whispers, will help not a whit.

In practicing remember first to be chary of emphasis. Never emphasize a word unless you think the sense absolutely demands it. For example:

"The quality of mercy is not strained."

Thoughtless readers are sure to make either quality or mercy, or possibly both, emphatic. But the thoughtful reader sees that the making of either of these words emphatic puts a meaning into the line not intended.

To say that "The quality of mercy is not strained" is to say that some other attribute of mercy is, or may be, strained -- the quantity, for example. And to say, "The quality of mercy is not strained" is to say that the quality of something else is, or may be, strained.

The thoughtful reader sees that Portia says simply this: "Mercy does not come by compulsion; it comes of itself; it is spontaneous," and, having seen this, he has no difficulty in deciding how the line should be emphasized.

The second thing to learn in reading is properly to distribute the time, to be slow and deliberate, to pause frequently and naturally. The accomplished reader always takes plenty of time. He that does not, he that hastens, never seems to be master of the situation, to have his task well in hand, and consequently he never is as effective as he might be. Nor must this deliberation appear in anything but in the frequency and in the length of the pauses. It must never appear in any drawling or slowing of the words; they must always come clean-cut and sharply defined. Pausing properly does more than any other one thing to make one's reading natural and realistic.

I submit two or three speeches from Shakespeare with the pauses, at the least, approximately indicated. Pauses made with discretion vary, of course, very much in length; some are only momentary, while others may be measured by seconds:

Speak the speech --- I pray you --- as I pronounced it to you --- trippingly on the tongue --- but if you mouth --- as many of our players do --- I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines. --- Nor do not saw the air too much --- with your hand --- thus --- but use all gently --- for in the very torrent --- tempest --- and (as I may say) whirlwind of your passion --- you must acquire --- and beget --- a temperance --- that may give it smoothness. . . .

One of the chief things to be attended to in reading is to give to the individual words the relative importance requisite to make the thought easy to understand for the listener. He that reads well trips lightly over a large majority of the words.

Natural tones are the tones of truth and honesty, of good sense and good taste. It is with them only that the understanding is successfully addressed; with them only that we can arouse and keep awake the intelligence of the listener, which is the object we always have in view, whether we speak our own language or that of another.

R. G. Collingwood, THE PRINCIPLES OF ART (1938)

Listening to a speaker instead of looking at him tends to make us think of speech as essentially a system of sounds; but it is not; essentially it is a system of gestures made with the lungs and larynx, and the cavities of the mouth and nose. We get still farther away from the fundamental facts about speech when we think of it as something that can be written and read, forgetting that what writing, in our clumsy notations, can represent is only a small part of the spoken sound, where pitch and stress, tempo and rhythm, are almost entirely ignored. But even a writer or reader, unless the words are to fall flat and meaningless, must speak them soundlessly to himself. The written or printed book is only a series of hints, as elliptical as the neumes of Byzantine music, from which the reader thus works out for himself the speech-gestures which alone have the gift of expression.

Discourse in which a determined attempt is made to state truths retains an element of emotional expressiveness. No serious writer or speaker ever utters a thought unless he thinks it worth uttering. What makes it worth uttering is not its truth (the fact that something is true is never a sufficient reason for saying it), but the fact of its being the one truth which is important in the present situation. Nor does he ever utter it except with a choice of words, and in a tone of voice, that express his sense of this importance. In proportion that a writer is skillful in getting his audience to grasp his meaning, attention to his choice of words and tone of voice will reveal a subtly appropriate texture of emotional expression.

When someone utters scientific discourse, saying, for example: "The chemical formula of water is H20," the tone and tempo of his voice make his emotional attitude towards the thought he is expressing clear to any attentive listener. He may be bored with it, and concerned only to get through the routine of a chemistry lesson; then he will say the words in a flat, dull tone. He may wish to impress the class with something they must remember for the sake of their examinations; then he will use a forced and hectoring tone. Or me may be excited by it, as a triumph of scientific thought which for him has never lost its freshness; then he will use an alert and lively tone, and fifty years afterwards an F.R.S. will say to a friend: "It was old Jones, you know, who really taught me chemistry." But in our writing and printing there is no notation for these differences, and consequently the reader of a sentence like "The chemical formula of water is H20" has no clue to them. One clear part of a writer's skill consists in so framing his sentences that an ordinarily intelligent reader cannot make nonsense of them by reading them, aloud or to himself, with the wrong intonation or tempo.

Instead of conceiving himself as a mystagogue, leading his audience as far as it can follow alone the dark and difficult paths of his own mind, [the artist] will conceive himself as his audience's spokesman, saying for it the things it wants to say but cannot say unaided. Instead of setting up for the great man who (as Hegel said) imposes upon the world the task of understanding him, he will be a humbler person, imposing upon himself the task of understanding his world, and thus enabling it to understand itself.

His business as an artist is to speak out, to make a clean breast. But what he has to utter is not, as the individualistic theory of art would have us think, his own secrets. As spokesman of his community, the secrets he must utter are theirs. The reason why they need him is that no community altogether knows its own heart; and by failing in this knowledge a community deceives itself on the one subject concerning which ignorance means death. For the evils which come from that ignorance the poet as prophet suggests no remedy, because he has already given one. The remedy is the poem itself. Art is the community's medicine for the worst disease of mind, the corruption of consciousness.

Northrop Frye, THE WELL-TEMPERED CRITIC (1963)

If we write in a way that we never speak, the first thing that disappears is the rhythm. It is hardly possible to give any spring or bounce to words unless they come out of our own bodies and are, like dancing or singing, an expression of physical as well as mental energy. The second thing that disappears is the color. It is hardly possible to use avid language unless one is seeing the imagery for oneself. The third thing that disappears is the sense of personality, which only a basis in personal speech can ever supply.

I find that I am unable to take this last step without raising a moral distinction. Genuine speech is the expression of a genuine personality. Because it takes pains to make itself intelligible, it assumes that the listener is a genuine personality too -- in other words, wherever genuine speech is spoken, it creates a community. Bastard speech is not the voice of the genuine self: it is more typically the voice of what I shall here call the ego. The ego has no interest in communication, but only in expression. What is says is always a monologue, though if engaged with others, it resigns itself to a temporary stop, so that the other person's monologue may have its turn to flow.