This first exercise is a most useful one in the uniting of notes and in gaining facility. The student should at first practise it very slowly, mastering four bars at a time. Although I have divided it into fifteen examples, it is really but one exercise, with a minim rest between each phrase of four bars; and it is in this example form that I wish the student ultimately to sing it with the metronome, at say 76, taking breath only at the rest-mark, and making the crescendo—not, be it observed, by forcing the tone and breath, but by a gradual pressing down of the breath.[2]

Exercise 2 is a further one for the practice of joining notes with the aid of the breath, without the least resemblance to a jerk with either the sound or the breath. To sing the exercise with advantage requires a very careful management of the respiratory organs, and its continuous practice is one of the best means of managing the breath. Having inspired the breath after the manner already indicated herein, proceed to sound the note F in a thin but firm and steady tone, which you must gradually swell, by pressing down the breath, as it were, into the following note G, which you will continue to hold steadily by keeping down the breath as long as you can. Though you raise your tone of voice in passing from F to G, you must dispel from your mind all notions of raising your breath or your larynx; it is just the reverse; you must lower these. Remember a golden rule—the higher your note the lower must it be generated in your chest, and your breath must be under the note supporting it, or there cannot possibly be any tone there. On reaching the highest limit of this exercise, the student will repeat the same operation down the scale, which I need scarcely say is less difficult.