You may be surprised to hear the man who has a download page with over 200 texts tell you that you can’t learn to sing from a book. Ok. That’s not entirely accurate. That same man might tell you—in the words of the famous vocal pedagogue Margaret Harshaw—that to learn to sing from a book: ”You have to know something to know something.” This means you’ve been around the block (and hopefully not gotten lost) more than a few times.

That man is me—case in point.

I taught myself to trill after reading a letter written by Jenny Lind, then put what I gleaned from Lind together with several other pieces of information—one key piece coming from Viardot-Garcia’s “An Hour of Study.”

The problem with learning from books?

By and large—they aren’t procedural. In motor-learning lingo, this means they feature explicit rather than implicit information—the latter being information that is how-to-oriented—the tailormade stuff that you get from a voice teacher.

Another problem?

There isn’t a feedback loop. The book can’t tell you—like a voice teacher with knowledge and great ears—that the thing you just did makes you sound like shit. And you do know, don’t you, that to sing bel canto you are going to sound like shit before you sing like a god.

Sorry (not sorry), but it’s true.

You will get one vowel to sound half-decently, then another, and then one after that until all of them merge into something else entirely and the voice finally appears—a process that takes at least two years. Rarely does a singer emerge—Streisand-like—from the box and make a million dollars.

Still another problem with learning to sing from a book?

Precious few of them have anything practical to say about the audition of one’s voice. Couple that with the too-oft-heard instruction to “don’t listen to yourself” and the abhorrence of “voice placement” and you have a muddle in the making.

[Yes. I am a great one for the observation that “feeling is listening,” since the means to feel the voice happens as a result of the semicircular canals in the ear. Yes. The ear is king and queen of singing.]

Margaret Harshaw—who influenced me more than any voice teacher—would say: “You can’t learn to sing from a book” and then turn around and say “It’s all true!” when speaking about Brown’s Vocal Wisdom: The Maxims of Giovanni Battista Lamperti. Paradoxes of perception. But then, Harshaw knew a thing or two—a knowing based on doing.

I have yet to meet a singer who reached the stage of the Metropolitan Opera and was self-taught from a book. Yes, Birgit Nilsson was noted as going into a practice room and coming out an hour or so later with her technique; but even so, she’d been exposed to more than a few ideas at that point, and it was about a decade after commencing study when she figured things out.

“I found a way to get the sound up in my head with the support, without applying pressure to the vocal chords.” —Birgit Nilsson, Great Singers on Singing, p 198.

Again—you have to know something to know something. It’s the first part of the equation that takes the most time.

In the end, what does the knowing?

Your ears.

Photo Credit: Page 211 from “The Lost Vocal Art” by W. Warren Shaw.