The Montgomery advertiser., 1906-04-08

Boston, April 7.-(Special)-So they say that Madame Adelina Patti is | thinking of making still another fare we'll tour of the United States and that at this age her voice is as young and clear as when ene was thirty, even twenty. Marvellous woman! Won dtrful press agents! Above all re- markedly well trained voice. to have endured in it's purity down to this year of our Lord. for Patti was born in Madrid in 1S43.
 Hers exemplifies what the leaders of musical education in all lands are coming more and more to realize the staying quality of a voice trained. or placed" as the techical expression Is, by the old Italian method. Pads come and go among society women who sing for their health or for the enjoyment sometimes feigned-- Of
 their friends. Fledgling teachers run off on tangents of tone production
 New ways of reaching high c" are
 devised But always the devotees of
 the latest fancies refore making good
 in their art get back at last to where
 they started from--to methods which
 Porpora devised in Italy just 200 years
 ago and under which practically all
 the worlds great singers have been educated George W. Chadwick. the
 
 tor of the New England Conservatory of Music. who Is spending year abroad in study of the European con servatories, has lately restated his con viction that the old Italian style of teaching singing is not only in class by itself but has no competitors for general favor.
 What the hundreds of teachers in this country who are engaged in the work of tone production in accordance with the method by which Malibran and Grisi and Nordica were trained have to say in it's favor is that 1t is the method of improving on nature by natural means The master of Italian singing selects the things that it is easy and natural for the voice to do, and then attains almost impossible ex- ceIlence in doing them. And that's very different, 1t Is said. from some | of the modern practices. Wagner, for example, who with all his marvellous abilities as composer never appre- ciated natures limitations upon the vocal organs, used the voice just like
 any instrument in the orchestra, treat
 ing it as he treated so much brass and catgut. It had to rise with the music to a shriek a~d sink to sigh
 without intermediate gradatien. Moth
 ing was too hard for tho Wagnerian
 singer to undertake, though his voice broke in the e11ort
 | In marked contrast is the Italian
 way. Go into a conservatory class
 today where singing Is being taught.
 The simple, comparatively easy things tare being done over and over again
 with the same thoroughness that
 characterized Porpora's instruction or his pupil Caffariello, who was required
 to vocalize the same two pages of
 exercises every day for six years. l t,sY-. he the instructor
 keeps saying with patient reiteration.
 Head up Shoulders back. Aha--a.
 Now try one of the dark vowels. Oh 60. Sing in the throat, not from It.
 This work is not purely intellectual lit is physiological. That is why the recently devised scheme of teaching singing with the aid of the phono- graph, so that the pupil may hear the sound of his own voice, has not been accepted as a valuable one by the teachers of song in the leading Ameri- can musical conservatory. The i'm | portant thing isn't so much to hear the sound of ones own voice as to have the vocal organs so well devel-
 oped that the right sounds will come in and year out the old Italian teach ing does more than impart knowledge to the pupil It above all develops 1 muscles of the palate and larynx
 which especially among those whose
 ordinary speech is harsh and runs to consonants. would otherwise be un- dersized from disuse The person who Is going to sing needsN not only to know how to sing but to have the re-
 auisite muscles for singing. Hence the truth of the old saying, "Chi canta lItaliamente canta tutto il tempo della sua vita" C"Whoever sings in the Italian way sings all the rest or ms nfe.")
 l That accounts for Patti. whose Iyoice was trained many years ago by Signor Rotoli. who from 1885 to the time of his death in 1904, was vo'