Course XXXIII - Teaching 13: Reading

Reading is important as a practice that can be applied to oratory, and also by itself too.
The technical part of the art of reading deals with two objects: voice and pronunciation, sounds and words.
Three sorts of voices (mentioned in the first part of the precedent Teaching), whose definition is: low, mean and high, are also indispensable to reading. The most solid, flexible and natural part is the mean one. Molé, a famous actor said in the matter: “You cannot reach immortality without the mean voice”. So, the first precept is that the mean voice should prevail on the exercise of reading; its way of finding it is mentioned above, even though you can find it with common sense and spirit of observation.
High chords are far more fragile and delicate. If you misuse them or play them quite frequently, then they wear out, get out of tune, become shrill and get out of order. Any misuse of low notes, and even of the grave, is not less fateful; it leads to monotony and comes up pale, dull and heavy.
So, mean voice, being ordinary, expresses the most natural and true feelings; on the other hand, low notes, because they are quite powerful, and high notes, because they are quite brilliant, should be used with extreme discretion, exceptionally.
Breath. Breath is life, but people breathe improperly. But to read properly you should read properly, and one cannot breathe properly without apprenticeship.
Just so an eolian harp vibrates through draughts, so also vocal chords need the air of your lungs condensed and transformed into necessary impulse in order to modulate notes that will become words. So, breath-in and breath-out are modules that should be under control. If you have to read out long time, your lungs will need much air to spend later. A bad reader does not breathe-in enough and breathes-out too much; so, he dissipates energy without order and measure. He is like a prodigal; he does not know how to give largely his wealth on great occasions and to save it on little occasions. What happens? You can see it daily: a reader as well as an orator are daily forced to laborious efforts, to noisy and harsh breaths-in (whines, whimpers), which tire and upset not only the orator but also his audience.
Try this: light a candle and, close and before it, utter and sing the vocal “a”; then the flame will oscillate lightly; but if, instead of one sound you go through a scale, you will see always that your voice is trembling. Well, the singer Delle Sedie would sing an upward and downward scale in front of a candle, and the light would not oscillate. How? Because he emitted just necessary air to push the sound out; so the air used to emit a note loses its condition of wind and becomes voice. Ordinary beings waste air constantly.
Remember, all movements of the soul are treasures. So, save for the due time.
A high chair is fit to breathe-in and breathe-out freely. If you are comfortably seated in an armchair, you are unable to breathe-in from the bottom of your lungs. It is advisable to be quite straight. Finally, if possible, your back should be supported.
The following exercise is recommendable to learn how to read out: choose any line of eleven syllables: “My love for Thee, my Lord, is not dependent…”
After a long breath-in, during the breath-out continue to emit distinctly the above-mentioned syllables. If these eleven syllables do not suffocate or disturb you, then try to say eighteen syllables with just one breath-out:
“My love for Thee, my Lord, is not dependent on the promise of your Heaven”. Later you may try twenty-four syllables. If necessary, you may start with just six syllables, but always slowly, four to five seconds to cover twelve syllables.
Finally, quite important: remember that punctuation rules comprise both reading and writing. You can notice it easily by observing punctuation in your reading. Many times a wrong coma as long as you read changes the sense of a sentence or blurs it totally.
Many times, as long as you read out, you grasp very clearly the text. It is like a revelation to your ears. Our eyes run through certain pages, overlook long paragraphs, and pass in a hurry through dangerous passages. But our ears hear all, do not jump, they are delicate, sensitive and anticipative: all this is out of the reach of our sight. This word, that our reading may overlook, suddenly acquires a colossal dimension through our ears; this sentence, hardly noticed, now rouses to fury.