the highest possible degree of purely
vocal perfection. One may attend operas and concerts for a whole season
and listen to a score of famous singers, and count oneself fortunate to
have heard even one artist who attains this standard of tonal
excellence. Singing on the breath is an effect of wondrous tonal beauty;
it is simply this, pure beauty, pristine and naive.

With the slightest degree of throat stiffness or muscular tension,
singing on the breath is utterly impossible. So soon as the tones
indicate the merest trace of throat contraction, the free outflow of the
stream of sound is felt to be checked.

Coloratura singing, to be absolutely perfect, demands this degree of
tonal excellence. Singing on the breath and coloratura are indeed very
closely allied. The modern school of musical criticism does not hold
coloratura singing in very high esteem. We demand nowadays expression,
passion, and emotion; we want vocal music to portray definite
sentiments, to express concrete feelings. Florid singing is not adapted
to this form of expressiveness. It is only sensuously beautiful; it
speaks to the ear, but does not appeal to the intellect.

Yet it may well be asked whether the highest type of coloratura singing,
pure tonal beauty, does not appeal to a deeper, more elemental set of
emotions than are reached by dramatically expressive singing. This
question would call for a profound psychological discussion, hardly in
place in a work devoted to the technical problem of tone-production. But
this much is certain: Coloratura singing still has a strong hold on the
affections of the music loving public. Even to-day audiences are moved
by the vocal feats of some famous queen of song fully as profoundly as
by the performance of a modern dramatic or realistic opera.

To describe a sound is an extremely difficult task. The tone of the
muted horn, for example, is perfectly familiar to the average musician.
Yet who would undertake to describe in words the tone of the muted horn?
A description of the sounds produced by a perfectly managed voice is
almost as difficult to frame in words. Still the old Italian masters
succeeded in finding words to describe perfect singing. These few simple
phrases--open the throat, support the tone, sing the tones forward, sing
on the breath--embody a most beautiful and complete description of vocal
perfection. The empirical study of the voice can hardly be expected to
go further than this. From the old