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It is highly important for the speaker or singer to realize early in his career that all forms of artistic expression can be carried out only through movements muscular movements; in other words, technique or execution implies the use of neuro-muscular mechanisms.
Each organ comes to perform some one function better than all others. This is specialization, and implies advance among animals as it does in civilization. The neuro-muscular system is of great moment to the voice-user. He is a specialist as regards the neuro-muscular systems of the vocal mechanism. But the same laws apply to it as to other neuro-muscular mechanisms.
A man learns to play one game of ball the better, usually, if he have already played at another, the reason being that he has only to modify the action of neuro-muscular mechanisms, not associate new mechanisms together to the same extent as in the formation of a habit of a widely different kind, as rowing a boat.
The degree to which any one succeeds in his earliest efforts to sing a scale will depend on the readiness with which he can use a variety of neuro-muscular mechanisms indeed, all those associated with the respiratory, laryngeal, and resonance apparatus. Fortunately for the voice-user, this apparatus has all been in use in ordinary speaking.
In England especially, where the movements of women are so often marked by awkwardness, angularity and lack of grace, it is essential that nothing should be done to emphasize these characteristics, for where vigor involves violence we are in the presence of a lack of due neuro-muscular coördination.
The effect of musical accompaniment, which the Swedish system wrongly rejects, is to make the exercises more fundamental and automatic, and to proportionately diminish the conscious effort and relieve the neuro-muscular mechanism involved in fine movements. Adolescence is the golden period of nascency for rhythm.
One may note especially the stiff, "expressionless" hands, indicating a general neuro-muscular defect. I have seen many children of eighteen months or two years of age in whom the movements necessary for efficient mastication and swallowing had failed to develop satisfactorily.
a. =Sports.= Most of the higher animals, particularly man, and all races of men, devote a large part of the energies of the adolescent period to sports or games in which individuals contend with each other or teams of individuals contend with opposing teams in games that bring into play the various powers of the neuro-muscular system: such as alertness of all the senses, readiness and correctness of judgment, agility, speed and strength of movement.
It follows that it is possible to conceive of the chest being enlarged in three, and only three, directions; so that it may be increased in size in its vertical, its transverse, and its antero-posterior diameter, or diameter from before backwards. This expansion, as in the case of all other movements, can be effected only by muscles, or, to speak more accurately, by neuro-muscular mechanisms.
In the animal we may take, for example, man the egoistic activities begin with the drawing of nourishment from the mother's breast and include all those activities of early childhood usually called play, the real significance of which is to develop the neuro-muscular system and the special senses, to that condition of alertness and strength that will make the growing individual self-supporting.
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