Vocal Pedagogy - History

History

Within Western culture, the study of vocal pedagogy began in Ancient Greece. Scholars such as Alypius and Pythagoras studied and made observations on the art of singing. It is unclear, however, whether the Greeks ever developed a systematic approach to teaching singing as little writing on the subject survives today.

The first surviving record of a systematized approach to teaching singing was developed in the medieval monasteries of the Roman Catholic Church sometime near the beginning of the 13th century. As with other fields of study, the monasteries were the center of musical intellectual life during the medieval period and many men within the monasteries devoted their time to the study of music and the art of singing. Highly influential in the development of a vocal pedagogical system were monks Johannes de Garlandia and Jerome of Moravia who were the first to develop a concept of vocal registers. These men identified three registers: chest voice, throat voice, and head voice (pectoris, guttoris, and capitis). Their concept of head voice, however, is much more similar to the modern pedagogists understanding of the falsetto register. Other concepts discussed in the monastic system included vocal resonance, voice classification, breath support, diction, and tone quality to name a few. The ideas developed within the monastic system highly influenced the development of vocal pedagogy over the next several centuries including the Bel Canto style of singing.

With the onset of the Renaissance in the 15th century, the study of singing began to move outside of the church. The courts of rich patrons, such as the Dukes of Burgundy who supported the Burgundian School and the Franco-Flemish School, became secular centers of study for singing and all other areas of musical study. The vocal pedagogical methods taught in these schools, however, were based on the concepts developed within the monastic system. Many of the teachers within these schools had their initial musical training from singing in church choirs as children. The church also remained at the forefront of musical composition at this time and remained highly influential in shaping musical tastes and practices both in and outside the church. It was the Catholic Church that first popularized the use of castrato singers in the 16th century, which ultimately led to the popularity of castrato voices in Baroque and Classical operas.

It was not until the development of opera in the 17th century that vocal pedagogy began to break away from some of the established thinking of the monastic writers and develop deeper understandings of the physical process of singing and its relation to key concepts like vocal registration and vocal resonation. It was also during this time, that noted voice teachers began to emerge. Giulio Caccini is an example of an important early Italian voice teacher. In the late 17th century, the bel canto method of singing began to develop in Italy. This style of singing had a huge impact on the development of opera and the development of vocal pedagogy during the Classical and Romantic periods. It was during this time, that teachers and composers first began to identify singers by and write roles for more specific voice types. However, it wasn't until the 19th century that more clearly defined voice classification systems like the German Fach system emerged. Within these systems, more descriptive terms were used in classifying voices such as coloratura soprano and lyric soprano.

Voice teachers in the 19th century continued to train singers for careers in opera. Manuel Patricio Rodríguez García is often considered one of the most important voice teachers of the 19th century, and is credited with the development of the laryngoscope and the beginning of modern voice pedagogy.

The field of voice pedagogy became more fully developed in the middle of the 20th century. A few American voice teachers began to study the science, anatomy, and physiology of singing, especially Ralph Appelman at Indiana University, Oren Brown at the Washington University School of Medicine and later the Juilliard School, and William Vennard at the University of Southern California. This shift in approach to the study of singing led to the rejection of many of the assertions of the bel canto singing method, most particularly in the areas of vocal registration and vocal resonation. As a result, there are currently two predominating schools of thought among voice teachers today, those who maintain the historical positions of the bel canto method and those who choose to embrace more contemporary understandings based in current knowledge of human anatomy and physiology. There are also those teachers who borrow ideas from both perspectives, creating a hybrid of the two.

Appelman and Vennard were also part of a group of voice instructors who developed courses of study for beginning voice teachers, adding these scientific ideas to the standard exercises and empirical ways to improve vocal technique, and by 1980 the subject of voice pedagogy was beginning to be included in many college music degree programs for singers and vocal music educators.

More recent works by authors such as Richard Miller and Johan Sundberg have increased the general knowledge of voice teachers, and scientific and practical aspects of voice pedagogy continue to be studied and discussed by professionals. In addition, the creation of organisations such as the National Association of Teachers of Singing (now an international organization of Vocal Instructors) has enabled voice teachers to establish more of a consensus about their work, and has expanded the understanding of what singing teachers do.