Coloratura singing, to be absolutely perfect, demands this degree of tonal excellence. Singing on the breath and coloratura are indeed very closely allied. The modern school of musical criticism does not hold coloratura singing in very high esteem. We demand nowadays expression, passion, and emotion; we want vocal music to portray definite sentiments, to express concrete feelings. Florid singing is not adapted to this form of expressiveness. It is only sensuously beautiful; it speaks to the ear, but does not appeal to the intellect. Yet it may well be asked whether the highest type of coloratura singing, pure tonal beauty, does not appeal to a deeper, more elemental set of emotions than are reached by dramatically expressive singing. This question would call for a profound psychological discussion, hardly in place in a work devoted to the technical problem of tone-production. But this much is certain: Coloratura singing still has a strong hold on the affections of the music loving public. Even to-day audiences are moved by the vocal feats of some famous queen of song fully as profoundly as by the performance of a modern dramatic or realistic opera. To describe a sound is an extremely difficult task. The tone of the muted horn, for example, is perfectly familiar to the average musician. Yet who would undertake to describe in words the tone of the muted horn? A description of the sounds produced by a perfectly managed voice is almost as difficult to frame in words. Still the old Italian masters succeeded in finding words to describe perfect singing. These few simple phrases--open the throat, support the tone, sing the tones forward, sing on the breath--embody a most beautiful and complete description of vocal perfection. The empirical study of the voice can hardly be expected to go further than this. From the old masters we have received a complete record of all that need be known empirically about the voice. CHAPTER V EMPIRICAL KNOWLEDGE IN MODERN VOICE CULTURE It was pointed out in Chapter I of Part III that there is no possibility of conflict between empirical and scientific knowledge. Modern Voice Culture seems to present a direct contradiction of this statement. The vocal teacher's empirical understanding of the voice conflicts at every step with his supposedly scientific knowledge. No doubt the reader is already aware of the real meaning of this apparent contradiction. It only bears out the philosophic rule; an accepted science must be abandoned so soon as its deductions are found to be not in accord with observed facts.