Edgar finalist and Nero Award winner, David C. Taylor's first novel in the Michael Cassidy thriller Series, Night Life, was nominated for Best Novel at the Mystery Writers of America's 2016 Edgar Awards. The ground-breaking, comprehensively rational and scientific critical analysis of modern methods of singing instruction. Probably the single most useful book on singing ever written, this work is a critical analysis which exposes the shortcomings and failures of modern methods of singing instructions. Having done so, it then proceeds to elaborate on the superseded method, namely bel canto or the so called old Italian method. The author establishes the validity of the latter method by reference to the results it obtained. He convincingly argues that the decline in the quality of singers can be arrested only by a return to the bel canto method. A peculiar gap exists between the accepted theoretical basis of instruction in singing and the actual methods of vocal teachers. Part I of this work contains a review of modern methods. In Part II a critical analysis is offered of certain theories of the vocal action which receive much attention in practical instruction. Part III contains a summary of all present knowledge of the voice. In Part IV the information about the vocal action obtained from the two sources is combined -the scientific knowledge of mechanical processes, and the empirical knowledge derived from attentive listening to voices.