Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy by James Stark (review)

260 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 conventional fictions whose stories she recounts with enthusiasm. She devotes over twenty pages to three popular novelists: François, Best, and Monferrand, but she totally ignores Cixous=s theory of female bisexuality as well as her The Book of Promethea (1983), an experimental fiction on female same-sex passion. She hardly mentions Wittig=s The Lesbian Body and dismisses Garréta=s Sphinx as irrelevant to her approach. But perhaps I am asking for too much subtlety from a pioneering reference book. (JEANNELLE LAILLOU SAVONA) James Stark. Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy University of Toronto Press. xxvi, 326. $75.00 While today=s voice teachers and voice scientists are increasingly embracing the use of technology in the voice studio, James Stark has ably traced the origins of voice pedagogy, and weighs their connection to present-day methods. The lines of understanding from one generation to another are not straight ones; they are jagged with controversy and the discoveries that alter previous thought. Stark has presented the important theories, practices, and questions yet unanswered in a style that is provocative, deftly researched, and at times humorously pointed. His writing style summons the historical narrative of Henry Pleasants and Cornelius Reid, functional and nationalistic vocal approaches as delineated by Richard Miller, and the scientific analysis of Johan Sundberg. Stark draws us into the main issues of voice pedagogy: discerning efficient and healthy vocal function, and the transmission of techniques to achieve expressiveness and style while embodying those healthy practices. He does so by gathering the historical cast of characters that have turned the journey of understanding into events of high drama. Within chapters entitled >The Coup de la Glotte: A Stroke of Genius,= >Registers: Some Tough Breaks,= and >Appoggio: The Breath be Dammed,= Stark pits theory against theory, and technique against technique in scholarly combat. The issues of vocal onset, breathing, >vocal tremulousness,= articulation, expressiveness, and arriving at a definition for >Bel Canto= are all rigorously explored. He outlines the pioneering work of Giulio Caccini, Manuel Garcia II, Francesco and Giovanni Battista Lamperti, and others in their attempts to systematize and codify their ideas of proper singing and voice teaching. In two of the book=s many examples illustrating the intensity of feeling surrounding singing matters, Stark recounts the impassioned controversy and misconception that met Manuel Garcia=s theories on vocal onset and his coup de la glotte. He also tells how Gilbert-Louis Duprez=s singing of a high C in >chest voice= in Rossini=s Guillaume Tell caused such a sensation with the Parisian public in 1837 that it eventually drove his tenor colleague Adolphe Nourrit to take his own life. Nourrit=s voice production followed the traditional taste HUMANITIES 261 of singing high notes with a brilliant, nasal tone. Such accounts put a human face on the search for physiological truths. Of further interest are Stark=s surveys of vocal registers and the evolution of knowledge on the subject, and a Germanic technique for breath control (Stauprinzip) as it compares with an Italianate approach to breathing (Appoggio). His depth of research in presenting opposing viewpoints is both formidable and reassuring. Manuel Garcia (acclaimed as the inventor of the laryngoscope) explored his own larynx in order to map its function and discover its proprioception in more detail. With the help of colleagues at the Gronigen Voice Research Lab in the Netherlands, Stark has followed in kind, stating that with the findings of Garcia and the Lampertis, >each generation must try anew to understand their meaning and significance.= The appendix of the book contains the results of this research, which the author carried out by >using himself as the singer-subject.= With a sampling from only one person, and that person being the author, this research is too modest to be substantive or conclusive on any recognized scientific basis. However, it does give a historical nod to Garcia=s work, as well as initiate a modern and more quantitative look at his theories and how they can clarify the specialized phonation required of singers. In Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy, Stark has brought together the worlds of voice teacher, laryngologist, and acoustician...