Today I’d like to focus on another change that cannot be ascribed to the wars, or even entirely to the mike, though it is part of the sociocultural shifts we associate with the former and has been much accelerated by the latter—and all the synchronicities fit here, too. It’s the decline of speech as a formal study. This is another matter I examine at some length in Opera as Opera, but is worth touching on here as one of our “Before the First Lesson” conditions. It was already underway before WW1, as is mostly clearly demonstrated by the changes, gradual in the single-lifetime context but quite sudden in historical perspective, in theatre practice. We can hear it on recordings, and recognize it as part of the reformation of acting from the older rhetorical model to what I call The Modern Acting Sensibility. (This also entailed a gradual drift from vocal expression to physical behavior as the dominant conveyer of meaning in acting.) It  affected all manner of public speech—of theatre, rostrum, pulpit—and was inextricable from changes in everyday social communication as well. It constituted a new model for what is believable, sincere, to be trusted in human discourse, and thus for how people choose (largely unconsciously) to present themselves to others. In war or in peace, electronically amplified or not, it was already a relative calming of laryngeal excitation.

Now imagine that you are no longer a brilliant young composer c. 1920, but a gifted young singer around the same time. (Of course, I could take you back one more generation, to the day when you would have never heard any voice, yours or another’s, reproduced in any form. But 1920—no radio yet, no talkies, only acoustical recordings, and those still new and in development—will do, and preserves our synchronicities.) In your schooling, you’ve had to recite from texts, and have been graded on your recitation’s audibility, clarity, and persuasiveness. You’ve undoubtedly taken some classical Latin and/or Greek and probably a modern language too, and have recited in those classes, as well. Both in school and in life, in any public circumstance whatever, from early childhood on—assemblies, church services, orations and debates and convocations and observances, rallies, toasts at dinner, etc.—you and all those to whom you listen have perforce spoken with some care to the force, clarity, pace, and emphasis needed to carry your voice over distances. The sonority and inflectional range of those voices, though modulated, is still there in private, conversational use—and there’s a big difference between such a voice, modulated, and one that’s unformed to begin with—and will remain your model through the early years of microphone creep. And if you, aspiring young singer of 1920, have not had the good fortune of an excellent education and background (if, for instance, as was often the case here in America, you belonged to an immigrant family with little formal education), your hardwired vocal habits are nonetheless more vigorous than your successors’ will be.

I haven’t yet touched on singing, on the classical, acoustical, high-culture model that you, the beginning student, would have had before you more or less uncontested, since although other kinds of singing existed, there was no thought of representing them as a standard to be emulated. In fact, had your exposure been almost exclusively to the sorts of singing heard in vaudeville or music hall, in cabaret or private clubs of dubious repute, you would still have been hearing acoustically projected voices. There was no other kind. And now, however uncultivated your upbringing and early listening experience, if you presented yourself for your first lesson with the hope of pursuing a singing career, you would have had to play catch-up to acquire, if only through inspired imitation, at least some of the more formalized structuring of your more-entitled peers. Though you and your teacher would have had plenty of work to do, one aspect of the work that would have required much less attention than it now often does (assuming that the need is even recognized) is the sheer building-block kind that establishes the foundation of an acoustically projected instrument of operatic calibre.