ABSTRACT
Authors of treatises on singing published in England between the late 18th and the middle of the 19th centuries view singing and speaking as arts which are related closely. Manuel Garcia, one of the most important teachers of singing in later 19th-century England, also taught his students to model their style of singing on speech. The two ways in which orators and singers articulated the structure of then-sentences were the observance of notated punctuation and the application of pauses in places where, although a stop was not indicated, the sense of a sentence called for one. Punctuation did more than simply indicate the nature of the pause to be employed, however, for it also suggested the cadence the voice was to have. Mary Novello expects breathing to reinforce the sense of sentences and advises singers to maintain the grammatical integrity of the text.
