5. 6. But wherefore do you droop? why look so sad? Be stirring as the time; be fire with fire; And fright him there? and make him tremble there? And now before the open door- The great bell swung as ne'er before; And every word its ardor flung Was, 'War! war! war!' -T. Buchanan Read-The Wild Wagoner of the Alleghenies. DIMINISHING FORCE. Diminishing Force-diminuendo-is expressive of relaxation, renunciation, submission, languor, fatigue, vanishing, fading, dying, ceasing, etc.; usually with a downward trend of melody. In general, it should be employed in making transitions; as, at the end of a paragraph, or at the beginning of a new one, and after climaxes. Thus symmetry and coherence are maintained, by the avoidance of sudden and abrupt changes. But, a sudden and wide change of mental or emotional attitude is to be signalized by correspondingly abrupt and marked vocal transition. 1. EXAMPLES OF DIMINISHING FORCE. Adam. Dear master, I can go no further. Oh, I die for food! Here lie I down, and measure out my grave. Farewell, kind master! 2. -Shakespeare-As You Like It. Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying. 3. Sleep and rest, sleep and rest, Father will come to thee soon; 4. Rest, rest, on mother's breast, Father will come to thee soon; Father will come to his babe in the nest, Under the silver moon: Sleep, my little one, sleep, my pretty one, sleep. -Id. Shipwrecked upon a kingdom, where no pity, -Shakespeare-King Henry VIII. 5. -But the knot had been securely bound; the victim sunk without effort; the waters, which his fall had disturbed, settled calmly over him; and the unit of that life for which he had pleaded so strongly, was forever withdrawn from the sum of human existence. 6. 7. No more, no more, The worldly shore -Scott-Rob Roy. Upbraids me with its loud uproar; With dreamful eyes, My spirit lies Under the walls of Paradise! -T. Buchanan Read-Drifting. Ah, sad and strange as, in dark summer dawns, To dying ears, when unto dying eyes The casement slowly grows a glimmering square; -Tennyson-The Princess. QUALITY. Quality is the word used to designate the modifications that the voice undergoes in volume and resonance, by various adjustments of the breathing action, and of the throat and re-enforcing cavities. Timbre and tone-color are used as equivalent terms. Quality is the distinctively emotional element of voice: not that it does not aid Time, Force, and Pitch, in the expression of judgment, energy, and motive; nor that they, in turn, do not aid in the expression of feeling; but its own especial function is emotional. The Qualities of voice recognized and named, are: Natural, Oral, Orotund, Nasal, Aspirate, Guttural, Pectoral, and Falsetto; but their modifications toward each other and their interfusions and blends produce varieties and shades of tonecolor practically innumerable. Each vowel has its inherent quality; but cultivation teaches them to borrow and lend; so that any one vowel may on occasion become the color note for all the rest. Thus either unity or contrast is at command. The statement that the office of Quality is emotional suggests the need of a workaday character of voice that is unemotional; as we have movement that is neutral, a pitch interval and a melodic progression that are inexpressive of feeling, and a syllabic form that is simply the vehicle of easy, distinct, unemphatic communication. This want Mother Nature has supplied; and to this impartial, colorless kind of voice Doctor Rush gave the name, Natural Quality. NATURAL QUALITY. Natural Quality-also called Normal Quality, and sometimes, by liberal license, Pure Tone-is, properly, the cul tivated voice of unimpassioned, matter-of-fact, or moderately animated speech. The uncultivated habitual voice is not necessarily, perhaps not usually, the real natural voice. Many a man lives a long lifetime, and dies, without ever having heard his own natural voice, after his boyhood. In the absence of right cultivation, wrong habits of tone production, re-enforcement, enunciation, and melody, so establish themselves that the sensitive ear is constantly assailed by strident, hoarse, thin, hollow, shrill, nasal, flat, weak, and blatant tones, until it almost questions the blessedness of speech, and longs for silence, 'like a poultice, to heal the blows of sound'; while the poor possessor of the afflicting organ consoles himself with the consideration that, if it is a poor thing, it is his own. It is not his, and he has no right to keep it. Well-directed and persevering practice of the exercises so far given, will surprisingly improve even a bad voice, and perfect a good one; that is, it will free, develop, and ripen the latent powers and possibilities of the true Natural Voice, and gradually correct faults of quality, force, pitch, and enunciation. In the light utterance of conversation, the resonance of the Natural Quality is principally in the front part of the mouth, and gains its ring and brilliancy by nasal re-enforcement. Not that breath and voice go into and through the nose; that would produce nasal twang; but, with the nares closed by the raising of the soft palate, a vowel utterance aimed against . the front of the hard palate causes the quiet air in the nasal chambers to vibrate harmonically; and the nasal vibrations blend with and become part of the tone issuing from the lips. The dull, muffled resonance of the voice when the head is stopped up with a severe cold, is chiefly due to the absence of nasal re-enforcement: it is a contradiction of fact to call such a quality a nasal tone. In public address, uncultivated speakers usually seek to secure audibility by mere loudness, without regard to the |