ch of its possessor's speaking voice. Training
should begin with the highest tone of the easy singing range. The reason
for this is that the higher tone requires a certain muscular tension
which places the singer, so to speak, on the _qui vive_ to the
importance of the task before him; whereas the greater relaxation on the
lower notes might cause him to regard the problem as too easy. At the
same time the higher note, still lying within the easy singing range,
does not call for a strain but simply acts as a spur.

Kofler gives six examples of easy singing ranges for as many
voice-divisions, and adds to each the qualification "more or less," thus
allowing for differences in individual voices. His easy singing ranges
are as follows:

[Music:

Soprano: G4-E5 More or less

Mezzo-Soprano: E4-D5 " " "

Alto: D4-C5 " " "

Tenor: E3-E4 " " "

Baritone: C3-C4 " " "

Bass: A2-A3 " " "]

Reference having been made to vowels and consonants, it seems proper to
add at this point something about diction in singing. The interpretation
of a song is tone-production applied to the emotional significance of
words. There seems little reason to doubt that the old Italian masters
sacrificed many things, clarity of diction included, to beauty of tone.
This they placed above everything. True, beauty of tone is the first
essential of artistic singing, but it is not the only essential. If song
is speech vitalized by music, then speech, the words to which music is
set, has some claim to consideration. In fact, the singer's diction
should convey the import of the spoken word with the added emotional
eloquence of music.

Indeed, even some of the earliest Italians recognized this. Caccini,
at the beginning of the seventeenth century, broke away from the
contrapuntal music of the church because it made the words unintelligible.
Tosi, who published a vocal method in 1723, a little less than a century
and a quarter after Caccini's declaration, still insisted on the
importance of clear diction. "Singers should not forget the fact," he
wrote, "that it is the words which elevate them above instrumentalists."
But with the introduction into Italian music of florid ornamentation,
which of itself made the words more or less unintelligible, they lost
their due importance, until, as many an old opera-goer still can
testify, a tenor