I read selections from Manuel Garcia’s Hints on Singing. I focused mostly on his descriptions of the differences in female’s voices and registers, as well as his thoughts on timbre.
Overall, I found the treatise to be really helpful. I understood what Garcia was saying and describing, and thought his explanations were done well. Sometimes he got very technical, and relatively speaking at that time he wrote it (in the mid to late 1800s) it was the most technical you could get. Because of that, I don’t think the book is wholly accessible, because I don’t see someone who has absolutely no idea about singing being able to pick up this book and know how to sing. Any reader of this book would need to have some background in voice already before reading this, if they wanted to understand and benefit from it.
Garcia’s format consisted of a Q and A form, where he posed questions (either as he pretending to be the reader, or listing questions that he’s heard asked before) and then explained them fully. It allows Garcia to avoid getting stuck in paragraph after paragraph of explanation, which I really appreciated. I think writing the book as a series of questions was a very smart move, because it breaks all the topics into pieces and allows them to be more manageable to understand.
A lot of terminology Garcia uses is still relatable and applicable to today. When discussing female registers, Garcia talks about the chest, medium, and head voice. These are terms teachers and singers still use today, and his description of them made sense to me and was still relevant. Something that stuck out as different from today was his use of the word falsetto. During his descriptions of the male voice he seemed to talk about falsetto as if it was head voice, which is definitely not how we think of falsetto today. My opinion is that he used the term falsetto to describe what we call male head voice today, and what we call falsetto is a sound that either Garcia didn’t acknowledge or men just didn’t use. This is my best way to explain his use of falsetto, though of course I cannot say for certain.
Something I thought was interesting was the top and bottom ranges Garcia gives for male and female singers. While he certainly goes to the extremes of the ranges in describes what each voice can sing, it seems to me in this day and age that there is an increasing amount of people who go decently beyond these parameters. Given that information I think if Garcia was writing this today, he’d go a bit further with the extremes of the ranges.
I was personally interested in Garcia’s description of registers and voice types. During his discussion on the different female voice types, Garcia presented a diagram showing the chest, middle, and head voice sections for the contralto, mezzo, and soprano voice types. What amused me the most about it was that I can sing all the notes on that diagram. Granted, I cannot sing a low E nearly as easily as a contralto can, but the note is still within my voice, as in the C6 that Garcia presents as the top of the soprano range. This relates to my thoughts on Garcia’s ranges not reflecting the voices of today. I know of several (if not many) women that can either sing lower and/or higher than me, and I think that reflects how the variety of voices has changed since Garcia’s time.
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