Voice and Nerve Control

by Jutta Bell-Ranske

Overview

From the Introduction.

Realizing that my book on the voice, "Health, Speech and Song," published in 1902, was inadequate to cope with the rapid progress in voice culture during the last few years, I decided that a more comprehensive and progressive work was essential, if my labors were to prove of any value.

I have, therefore, written an entirely new book, embracing what I considered of vital interest in the earlier work and developing it to meet what I believe to be the need of today. I sincerely hope that the result of my added years of untiring investigation will both carry conviction and prove of service.

Thirty years of practical experience as a lecturer and teacher of voice culture have led me to believe that there is but one reasonable way of training the vocal organ, and that its systematic development can be so practically presented in book form, that students, to a great extent, can do the fundamental work without the aid of a master.

In this book I have attempted to bring elocution and song into much closer relation; hoping to prove that since both involve the progressive development of the same organ, they are closely related in their methods.

In spite of the many advanced conceptions of vocal art, voice production still remains, to a very dangerous degree, a matter of guesswork, and this confusion springs largely from want of discrimination between the preparatory work needed for the adjustment of the organ and the art of playing upon it. It is because of this confusion that both the beauty and the endurance of the voice so often remain unrealized, both by the speaker and the singer.

But even apart from the artistic values, it is time we should recognize that voice-culture is intimately related to health, wherefore it concerns not only the artist, but everyone.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781663515841
Publisher:	Barnes & Noble Press
Publication date:	06/10/2020
Pages:	250
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.57(d)

About the Author

Jutta Bell-Ranske (1862? — 22 October 1934) was a Norwegian soprano, writer and voice teacher. She made her Wigmore Hall debut in this prodigious evening concert alongside her daughter Tullik Bell-Ranske and one of her students, May Warren. The programme spanned a broad selection of nineteenth-century European song and included duets by Brahms and Dvorák, folk song settings by the Swedish composer Isidor Dannström, and two songs by Delius whose home in Florida had made him a neighbour of the Bell-Ranske family. Delius and Jutta Bell-Ranske had worked together on two of his operas, and she would later go on to write the libretto for another opera, "The Temple Dancer" by the American composer John Adam Hugo.