cline. In 1800 it was distinctly on the wane; it was entirely
superseded, during the years from 1840 to 1865, by the modern scientific
methods.

Considered as a practical system of Voice Culture, the old Italian
method is a highly mysterious subject. Little is now known about the
means used for training students of singing in the correct use of the
voice. This much is fairly certain: the old masters paid little or no
attention to what are now considered scientific principles. They taught
in what modern vocal theorists consider a rather haphazard fashion. The
term "empirical" is often applied to their method, and to the knowledge
of the voice on which it was based.[1] But as to what the old masters
actually knew about the voice, and just how they taught their pupils to
sing, on these points the modern world is in almost complete ignorance.
Many attempts have been made in recent years to reconstruct the old
Italian method in the light of modern scientific knowledge of the voice.
But no such analysis of the empirical system has ever been convincing.

[Note 1: "The old Italian method of instruction, to which vocal
music owed its high condition, was purely empirical." (Emma Seiler, _The
Voice in Singing_. Phila., 1886.)]

How the practical method of the old masters came to be forgotten is
perhaps the most mysterious feature of this puzzling system. There has
been a lineal succession of teachers of singing, from the earlier
decades of the eighteenth century down to the present. Even to-day it is
almost unheard of that any one should presume to call himself a teacher
of singing without having studied with at least one recognized master.
Each master of the old school imparted his knowledge and his practical
method to his pupils. Those of his pupils who in their turn became
teachers passed the method on to their students, and so on, in many
unbroken successions. Yet, for some mysterious reason, the substance of
the old method was lost in transmission.

What little is now known about the old method is derived from two
sources, the written record and tradition. To write books in explanation
of their system of instruction does not seem to have occurred to the
earliest exponents of the art of Voice Culture. The first published work
on the subject was that of Pietro Francesco Tosi, _Osservazione sopra il
Canto figurato_, brought out in Bologna in 1723. This was translated
into English by M. Galliard, and published in London in 174