Known as the doyenne of voice teachers, Margaret Harshaw was born on this date in 1909, the same year that Hermann Klein hightailed it back to London after American voice teachers rejected his leadership as the first chairman of the National Association of Teachers of Singing* and its standards and certification.

Harshaw shaped this singer and writer more than anyone, turning him into a researcher with one question.

“What did you learn since your last lesson?” — Margaret Harshaw

Instead of feeling like I was being grilled, I heard something completely different: She thought I had a brain and believed I could figure things out. So I did. I asked questions, transcribed everything she gave me, and when I couldn’t get enough, began researching her lineage. It was a slow start. I found myself looking through books on music at bookstores before realizing I needed to go to a library, which I did after joining the New York City Opera.

Harhaw helped many musicians find themselves, not just singers; I interviewed a well-known conductor who played in her studio and told me she was the first person to identify his talent.

Life-changing lady.

Harshaw treated the voice as an instrument. Before singing any repertoire, one had to learn to sing technically in the context of scales and exercises. She taught her students, who became teachers, to do the same by example. Whether this has continued is another matter. And by continuing, I mean voice teachers taking this approach. I think the instrumental approach is the road less traveled today. In fact, most voice teachers today function as coaches. They parlay information rather than procedure as it was practiced by the old school.

Simply singing scales doesn’t cut it. You must know how to sing a scale; that is, you must do so with pure vowels—another matter entirely. Every step in the instrumental approach has to be considered carefully and mastered before proceeding to the next step. This approach takes years, not weeks, days, or months.

Every singer on this path has their beginning.

Schoen-René gave Harshaw three weeks to sing every tone from the bridge of her nose, or she would lose her scholarship. Before her studies, Harshaw’s voice was reviewed as being “reedy.” Afterward, the descriptor was “opulent.”

I give thanks every day to Margaret Harshaw and her own teacher, Anna Eugénie Schoen-René.

* The National Association of Teachers of Singing was founded in 1906. After Klein returned to London, NATS abandoned the effort for standards and certification; in 1917, NATS changed its name to The New York Singing Teachers Association. The organization that currently has the NATS moniker was founded in 1944.