Dear Editor: Kudos on an amazing special edition of the February 2007 Classical Singer. I write this congratulatory letter after recently retiring from a 40-year university career of teaching, researching, and writing about the family. I have authored or co-authored three books and over 50 referred journal articles and seldom have I seen a specialized publication treat the topic of the family with as much reverence and awe coupled with fundamentally sound familial information and advice as your February issue.
If I were still teaching graduate seminars on the family, I would have your special issue on the required reading list and assign an essay analyzing how interaction in one family system (such as the conjugal) defines, limits and/or enhances interaction in another family system (such as parental).
Since the traditional western family is defined as consisting of three interactional systems (conjugal, parental, and sibling), it would be wonderful for you to do an encore issue which focused on the sibling interaction in families where parents were pursuing musical careers. I hazard the guess that there is a sufficiently large enough pool of such siblings to produce another superb portrayal of the reciprocal influence of music and family in our contemporary world.
—Darwin L. Thomas, via e-mail
Dear Editor: [My] reason for contacting you is to extend my congratulations on filling a tremendously important void in the voice performance profession world through developing Classical Singer into a major vehicle for the furtherance of the singing art. Hats off! Keep up the excellent work.
—Richard Miller, via e-mail
