The Child-Voice in Singing / Treated from a physiological and a practical standpoint and especially adapted to schools and boy choirs

A few pages in Chapter VI (Vowels) contain characters that will only display correctly in unicode (utf-8):
ā, a̤, Ē, ē, Ō, ō (“long” vowels) ă, ĕ, ĭ, o͡o (“short” vowels)
The “flat” symbol ♭ is also used a few times. Sharps are shown with the “number” sign # instead of the less widely available ♯.
If any of these characters do not display properly—in particular, if the diacritic does not appear directly above the letter—or if the quotation marks in this paragraph appear as garbage, make sure your browser’s “character set” or “file encoding” is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You may also need to change the default font.
A few typographical errors have been corrected. They have been marked in the text with mouse-hover popups .
One of the most encouraging signs of the growth of musical taste and understanding at the present time as regards the singing of children, is the almost unanimous acquiescence of choirmasters, supervisors, teachers, and others in the idea that children should sing softly, and avoid loud and harsh tones; and the author ventures to hope that the first edition of this book has helped, in a measure at least, to bring about this state of opinion.
It is true that for a long time the art of training children’s voices has been well understood by choirmasters of vested choirs, and by many others, but its basis was purely empirical.
Something more, however, than the dictum of individual taste and judgment is needed to convince the educators of our schools of the wisdom of any departure from established customs and practices. The primary end, then, of the author has been to show a scientific basis for the use of what is herein called the head-voice of the child, and to adduce, from a study of the anatomy and physiology of the larynx and vocal organs, safe principles for the guidance of those who teach children to sing.
The conditions under which music is taught in schools call for an appeal to the understanding first, and taste afterward. These conditions are: