Vocal Wisdom & William Earl Brown
Margaret Harshaw was loath to recommend any book on singing—insisting that you couldn't learn to sing from one, but if she could be persuaded to name one, you would hear her mention William Earl Brown's Vocal Wisdom which contains the maxims of Giovanni Battista Lamperti, son of the great Italian maestro Francesco Lamperti.
She would say…
"You have to know something to know something!"
What she meant, of course, was that you would better understand Lamperti's teaching if you had been around the block a couple of times. If not? Then you had better start running.
The chief function of the head in the producing of a singing tone is that of a reflector. —William Earl Brown,The Musician, 1932.
William Earl Brown, a teacher of singing for more than half a century, who had a residence and studio at 57 West Seventy-Fifth Street, died on Tuesday of a heart attack in Mount Sinai Hospital at the age of 82. He was active as a teacher and was at work on the manuscript of a book on his profession to supplement an earlier volume, "Vocal Wisdom." Mr. Brown studied singing in Austria, Germany and Italy, his teachers including Lamperti. Suriving is a niece, Mrs. Kelsey Flower of Deerfield, Mass. —NYtimes, May 17, 1945.