The Free Voice: A Guide to Natural Singing - Taschenbuch

Reid's first book Bel Canto: Principles and Practices came out in 1950 and was followed by The Free Voice: A Guide to Natural Singing in 1965. Reid's teachings were based on the books of famous voice teachers of the 17th to the 19th centuries. They included Giulio Caccini, Pier Francesco Tosi, Giovanni Battista Mancini, Domenico Corri, Francesco Lamperti, Giovanni Battista Lamperti, Manuel Patricio Rodríguez García, Isaac Nathan and Julius Stockhausen. In the festschrift Stephen F. Austin honors Cornelius Reid and those that have studied with him: "Only rarely does one find a voice teacher employing a method in which the registers of the voice are being used in the way that made singing in the bel canto era the greatest that mankind has known. If such a teacher is discovered, it is most likely that he or she has been influenced, directly or indirectly, by one man. Cornelius Reid has made a singular contribution to vocal pedagogy because he has kept the ancient traditions of teaching as established and tested in the fire of the eighteenth-century opera houses alive in the twentieth century-and now the twenty-first century."[9] A summary of Reid's pedagogy appeared in the Journal of Singing: "Reid's approach rests upon the two register theory and a belief that the only factors that can exert voluntary control upon the involuntary laryngeal muscles are pitch, intensity and vowel. Exercises employing various combinations of these three controls, in combination with the use of "functional listening"-a careful analysis of the registrational balances-will result in a free technique."