rmanent disappearance of many cases of laryngitis through
learning to produce the voice correctly.

The second step in securing right conditions is the proper management of
the breath.

BREATH CONTROL

An extremist always lacks the sense of proportion. He allows a single
idea to fill his mental horizon. He is fanciful, and when an idea comes
to him he turns his high power imagination upon it, and it immediately
becomes overwhelming in magnitude and importance. Thereafter all things
in his universe revolve around it.

The field of voice teaching is well stocked with extremists. Everything
involved in voice production and many things that are not, have been
taken up one at a time and made the basis of a method.

One builds his reputation on a peculiar way of getting the tone into the
frontal sinuses by way of the infundibulum canal, and makes all other
things secondary.

Another has discovered a startling effect which a certain action of the
arytenoid cartilages has on registers, and sees a perfect voice as the
result.

Another has discovered that a particular movement of the thyroid
cartilage is the only proper way to tense the vocal cords and when every
one learns to do this all bad voices will disappear.

Another has discovered something in breath control so revolutionary in
its nature that it alone will solve all vocal problems.

Perhaps if all of these discoveries could be combined they might produce
something of value; but who will undertake it? Not the extremists
themselves, for they are barren of the synthetic idea, and their sense
of proportion is rudimentary. They would be scientists were it not for
their abnormal imaginations. The scientist takes the voice apart and
examines it in detail, but the voice teacher must put all parts of it
together and mold it into a perfect whole. The process is synthetic
rather than analytic, and undue emphasis on any one element destroys the
necessary balance.

The immediate danger of laying undue emphasis on any one idea in voice
training lies in its tendency toward the mechanical and away from the
spontaneous, automatic response so vitally necessary. Here the
extremists commit a fatal error. To make breath management the
all-in-all of singing invariably leads to direct control, and soon the
student has become so conscious of the mechanism of breathing that his
mind is never off of it while singing; he finds himself becoming rigid
trying to prevent his breath from