Beginnings

I have 14 black and white composition notebooks full of research. They date from 1990-2001.

Open them up and you find a masterclass given by Joan Sutherland at Julliard, information on Hermann Klein that ended up in Hidden in Plain Sight: The Hermann Klein Phono-Vocal Method Based upon the Famous School of Manuel Garcia, notes from a book on bel canto that was in Adolf Hitler’s library, my experience with Tomatis’ listening training, personages like Frederic Root, Luisa Tetrazinni, Sterling Mackinlay, Lucie Manén, Gergory Hast, Edmund Myer, Charles Battaille, Elster Kay, Ida Franca, Julius Stockhausen, Agnes Lackom, Anna Lankow, Lilli Lehmann, Evelyn Hagara, Emma Thursby, George Meader, Clara Kathleen Rogers, Crystal Waters, Lillian Flickinger, and many more. There is research on Manuel Garcia, Pauline Viardot-Garcia, and Anna Schoen-René and her students, as well as lesson notes and interviews with students of Margaret Harshaw. Among the latter is the famous singer who generously gave me four interviews, the singer who dangled information while looking for a boyfriend, and more than one conductor-pianist who relayed the most astute observations.

This early research was done by hand. Scanning wasn’t allowed for copyrighted material, Google Books was in its infancy, and historical vocal pedagogy texts could only be found and read in a library. Now, everything has changed. My website alone has 200 downloads, and I routinely copy material using my iPhone. After 2001, I began storing research on my laptop and filled one external hard drive and another when the first one wasn’t big enough.

Call me obsessed.

I found Garcia’s proprietary techniques and the Lampertis method's key—even if the latter was not my original aim. I kept researching, searching, and digging with the odd feeling that everything I found wanted to find me. If novelists talk about their characters talking to them, the small voice that told me: “You really should look into so-and-so” never failed me.

Why did I do it? Why did I spend so much time and energy researching dead people and arcane concepts? It’s simple. My lessons with Margaret Harshaw during the mid-1980s and extending into the 1990s were catalytic and life-altering. I went from being a kid who didn’t know how to move his voice to a professional singer with the New York City Opera and Metropolitan Opera. That I only studied with Harshaw during the summers at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey, made me want to know more. So I did that. I learned more: assiduously, slowly, and resolutely—with an increasing understanding of what mattered and what didn’t.

If Margaret Harshaw was the beginning, her teacher Anna Eugénie Schoen-René soon became the nexus of my work because I found she not only studied with Pauline Viardot-Garcia and Manuel Garcia but also with Francesco Lamperti—a fact she omitted from her memoir. She knew everything and everyone. So I went to the source.