David C. Taylor

David Clark Taylor (1871–1918) was an American voice teacher and writer on singing who worked in New York. His principal book, The Psychology of Singing (1908), attacked the mechanical methods of vocal instruction then dominant, which asked students to control breath, registers and resonance consciously, and argued from the testimony of the old Italian masters that the voice is trained through the ear and by imitation of good tone. He followed it with Self-Help for Singers (1914) and New Light on the Old Italian Method (1916), developing the same thesis for students working without a teacher.