The great prizes of the operatic stage and concert hall go to the higher voices--to sopranos, for example, instead of to altos. Yet the proper training of an alto voice is a most difficult matter because, while the chest register is the natural singing register of alto, it produces too "big" a tone--a tone so big as to be heavy and unwieldy. The middle register in alto really is an assumed position, yet it is the register in which the standard alto tone is produced. Teachers who either are ignorant of these facts or disregard them are apt to carry up the cumbersome chest register until it meets the thin head register, producing a voice whose low notes are too heavy and tend toward the uncanny and by no means agreeable female baritone quality, while the higher notes are thin and undecided in character. The male voice-range is the same as the female, save that it lies an octave lower; its mechanism is the same; and its registers are the result of identical physical functions. Thus, allowing for the octave difference, the tenor voice and the laws that govern it correspond for all practical purposes with soprano. Tenors are lyric and dramatic, a distinction that explains itself. The lyric tenor is light and flexible. The dramatic tenor is a ringing, vibrant voice, especially on the high notes. Probably it is the splendor of these high notes that is responsible for the theory that they are produced by carrying the chest register upward. In point of fact, a genuine chest register rarely is employed by tenors. Their easiest, their natural singing range, is in the middle register, and the tones which in the notation of the tenor compass are assigned to the chest register, really are sung in what is more like a downward extension of the middle register. Just as the larynx of the soprano is not as large as that of the alto or contralto and is not capable of the open adjustment required by the chest register, so the larynx of the tenor is smaller than that of bass or baritone and, like the soprano, less capable of the open adjustment for chest register. The result is the same--a perceptible weakness on the lower notes, the great qualities of the voice lying in the middle and head registers, especially in the latter.