Motion picture acting (1947)

Page scan 00055 from Motion picture acting

Record Details:

Title:
Motion picture acting
Date:
1947
Publisher:
New York, Funk & Wagnalls Co
Volume:
Motion picture acting
Leaf #:
00055
Language:
English
Contributor:
Internet Archive
Sponsor:
Internet Archive
Coordinator:
Media History Digital Library
Date Added:
July 19, 2022
Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

SPEECH last and all the time. I am not speaking so much of the "pop" singers, but those with highly-trained voices— singers. To make my meaning clear, let us look at the re- spective purposes of singing and speaking. What does each attempt to do? The ballad and classical singer is concerned above all else with the creation of beautiful tone. The lyrics, to be sure, tell a story, but it is set in poetical form within the further confines of musical form. Words are prolonged to fit certain notes to be sung, in total disregard for their importance of emphasis or even of common sense, for that matter. (Understand, I'm not objecting. That's just wonder- ful—for singing!) This being true, the singer's voice must be trained to sustain tone arbitrarily, and breathing must be controlled to support a phrase in unbroken smoothness for no reason whatever but the musical effect. But is that how a speaker would deliver those same poetical lines, where his entire concern is to convey their meaning, their rhythm, and their beauty of thought? It certainly is not. The speaker would be giving expression prima- rily to ideas, unconfined by the hard and fast re- strictions which music imposes, and he would 29