In We Sang Better, two hundred of these singers explain the art of singing in over 70,000 of their own words. Much of their evidence is appearing for the first time in a modern edition. In Volume 2 Why It Was Better (260 pp) the singers explain how they enabled the possibility of superlative singing.

James Anderson is a musician who has worked for the Arts Council of Great Britain and has run major European Festivals. Regretting the scarcity of supreme singing today, he has spent the last thirty years trawling through the treatises, letters and recorded comments of many of the greatest singers between 1800 and 1960.