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This is how my first voice teacher berated my speech-making. She said: "Spit out the pebbles on your tongue and cough out the potatoes
from the back of your mouth. Shape the sound, enunciate the words, control the breathing. If you can't do that, you're only half an actor!"
Ah me, we are awash in half-actors and half-singers, aren't we?
With the torrential downgrading of art and media to the lowest common denominator, so-called 'elitist' pursuits such as cursive
handwriting and elocution have disappeared from American public education. We're inundated with children who cannot write with their prehensile thumbs and who mumble-speak
through their numbed noses.
It began in the 1950's when adolescent music-making swished into the mainstream and said: "It ain't about the music, it's
rock&roll." And when country-western music-making twisted into the mainstream and said: "It ain't about the music, it's common-folk singing." And more
recently when rap-chatter rolled&rocked into the mainstream along with disposable so-called "reality television" which says: "Boring is good, anybody can be a
'star', that's what's real."
Go back 60 years. The 'Golden Years' of Hollywood were still shining. From the broadest Epic to the lowliest B-feature, actors
delivered their dialogue with enunciated clarity, other than Marlon Brando. He had a trained vocal instrument which he displayed with his performances in "Julius Caesar"
and "Desiree". Probably had to do with the fact that he was working with casts of almost all British actors. Yet for the broad sloppy swath of his career, on stage and
screen, he mumbled like a smack-addict in Alaska because as an actor, he was lazy, crazy and dumb.
Go back 60 years. Pop and jazz, I'll cite only three:
Jo Stafford, she of 'perfect pitch' fame, not a great "phraser" but she gave you every syllable, articulated and clean
surrounded by her amazing gift to strike notes pinpoint pure.
June Christy, she of 'cool jazz' fame, a protégé of Stan Kenton, clarity was her hallmark.
And then there was Frank Sinatra. Unarguably the best pop/jazz singer ever recorded. He wasn't well educated but he did receive some voice training. He reached a level of musicianship, singership, unmatched to this day. His ability to phrase was simply a remarkable gift of magic, and he gave you every syllable, every letter, every overtone, every undertone. Like most singers of his day, the lyric was everything.
I could on and on. But let me touch on a few current curious ironies.
Most television series, broadcast and cable, American, British, French and others are ridden with performers who don't speak well. It
doesn't seem to matter. But then, there's the madly successful "Game of Thrones". Amidst its stuffed-pizza script and video-game plots there is the relief of a
group of actors who not only can speak but can use their voices as instruments. It's because most of them (not all) are trained British actors. And those that are not are
forced to reach the bar.
Australian Broadcasting, Australia Plus, is an ear-shaking mélange of accents and words coming through the TV speaker. Spoken Australian
English is not the most pleasant spoken language on the planet — its enunciation is squeezed, twisted, and filtered through the sinuses. It has much in common with the
environment in which it thrives. The A+ sportscasters are the worst, no, awfully worse. They don't just mumble, they squeeze their words as they chew the pebbles and mash the
potatoes that fill their mouths. It is a grateful viewer who has a mute button.
BBC World News, that fountain of the Queen's English delivered with the sincerity of the great Big Ben. In their race to catch the train of
multi-cultural diversity, BBC has dropped their standards, faces without voices. Olympus cries when it hears the mutilation of what was once clean, clear, broadcast words. Even
France24's worldwide English broadcasts has better, more articulate voices. So much for the Chunnel across the channel.
And while we're qvetching and qveyning about performers' voices, let me cite one atrocious aspect of current cinema: the dubbing of
voices in films when they are presented in foreign markets. Half of a film-actor is their voice. Cover it in a film with a dubbed voice in a foreign language and you can lose up to
half of their performance. It's not just the translated changes in dialogue. It's the loss of the actor's voice with all of its inflection, innuendo, mood, and subtle
reinforcement of the visual acting. It sometimes results in losing half the film. Subtitles are annoying but they're enhanced... by the actor's voice. So much for our
disposable modern cinema.
As the great articulator Lenny Bruce would say:
"And that's that!"
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Writings
