g as walking from
dancing. Speech may be called the prose, and song the poetry of
vocalization.

During the past decade the knowledge of the speaking voice has been
greatly broadened, and the art of cultivating tone has made progress.
The identity of the singing and speaking voice is becoming more fully
recognized, and methods are being used to develop the latter similar
to those in use for the training of the former. As Dr. Morell
Mackenzie says: "Singing is a help to good speaking, as the greater
includes the less."

The recognition of this truth cannot fail to be a great aid to the
progress of singing in the public schools, since every enlargement of
exercises common to both speaking and singing helps to solidarity and
_esprit de corps_ in teaching and in learning.

An accurate sense of pitch, melody, harmony, and rhythm is necessary
to the singer, but the orator may, by cultivation, develop a speaking
voice of musical quality without being able to distinguish _Old
Hundred_ from _The Last Rose of Summer_.

PRONUNCIATION

It is a matter of common observation that American singers, although
they may be painstaking in their French and German, are indifferent,
even to carelessness, in the clear and finished enunciation of their
native tongue. Mr. W.J. Henderson, in his recent work, _The Art of the
Singer_, says: "The typical American singer cannot sing his own
language so that an audience can understand him; nine-tenths of the
songs we hear are songs without words." Happily this condition is
gradually yielding to a better one, stimulated in part by the examples
of visiting singers and actors. In story-telling songs and in
oratorio, slovenly delivery is reprehensible, but when the words of a
song are the lyric flight of a true poet, a careless utterance becomes
intolerable.

Beauty of tone is not everything; the singing of mere sounds, however
lovely, is but a tickling of the ear. The shortcoming of the Italian
school of singing, as of composition, has been too exclusive devotion
to sensuous beauty of tone as an end in itself. The singer must never
forget that his mission is to =vitalize text with tone=. The songs of
Schubert, Schumann, Franz, Brahms, Grieg, Strauss, and Wolf, as well
as the Wagnerian drama, are significant in their inseparable union of
text and music. The singer is therefore an interpreter, not of music
alone, but of text made potent by music.

Pronunciation, moreover, concerns not only the l