one, the _nasal_ tone, the _guttural_ tone, the tone that
issues from a set jaw or an unruly tongue. All mean tension of muscles
somewhere, and must be met by relaxation of these muscles and the
freeing of the channel. How to relax the throat shall be our initial
point of attack. A suggestion made by my first teacher proved most
helpful to me, a suggestion so simple that I did not for the moment take
it seriously. "Think," she said, "how your throat feels just before you
yawn." "Yes," I replied, irrelevantly, "and just after you have eaten a
peppermint--that cool, delicious, open sensation." This impressed her as
significant, but not so effective as her suggestion to me, which I felt
to be true when I began to think of it seriously, and so, of course, to
yawn furiously. Try it.

Think of the yawn. Close your eyes and feel how the deep breath with
which the yawn begins (the need of which, indeed, caused it) opens the
throat, relaxing all the muscles. Now, instead of yawning, speak. The
result will be a good tone, simply because the condition for tone was
right. The moment the yawn actually arrives, the condition is lost, the
throat closes; but in that moment before the break into the yawn, the
muscles about the throat relax and the channel opens, as the muscles
controlling the diaphragm tighten and the deep breath is taken.

These, then, are the first exercises in the second step in vocal
training. This step is called _Freeing the Tone_.

_First._--Yawn, noting the sensation.

_Second._--Just before the throat breaks into the yawn, stop, and,
instead of carrying out the yawn, speak. Repeat this fifty times a day,
or ten times, as often as you will. Only, keep at it. Take always a
single full-voweled monosyllable; _one_, or _four_, or _no_, or _love_,
or _loop_, or _dove_, etc.

We cannot, in a printed consideration, touch more in detail upon
individual cases, but must confine ourselves to these simple exercises,
which will, in general, be swiftly and effectively remedial.

But we must not stop with the throat, which is but part of the channel
involved in the emission of breath as speech. There is the tense jaw to
be reckoned with--the jaw set by nervous tension, the jaw which refuses
to yield itself to the moulding of the tone into the beautiful open
vowel and the clean-cut consonant which make our words so interesting to
utter. It is the set jaw which, forcing the tone to squeeze itself out,
causes it to sound thi