View Karen Clark teaching an Awareness Through Movement®
class to Dickinson College voice students.
Karen Clark's Professional Associations include:
National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS)
Feldenkrais Guild of North America (FGNA)
NATS Redwood Chapter
Berkeley Piano Club
San Francisco Women's Musician Club
Teaching Style and Philosophy
"Singing is an adjustment between mind and movement."
--Giovanni B. Lamperti
In Karen's studio, technical studies join with movement lessons to heighten kinesthetic awareness and develop more efficiency in vocal exercises. Introducing curiosity, healthy inquiry, and a playful non-judgemental attitude into our studies strengthens our ability to make finer distinctions within ourselves:
Am I really doing what I intend to do?
How could my singing feel and sound better?
How could the tone and colors be more appropriate to the feeling and expression of the song?
What do I do differently to sing Bach as compared to Donizetti, Machaut, or Mahler?
Karen tailors each lesson to the specific needs of the individual and to the particular language and repertory. For example, movement lessons may be used to explore the relationship between posture and breathing, clarify the independence and shaping of the speech articulators, and how our imagination and thinking informs resonance and tone color.
Vocal Health in Ensemble & Choral Singing
In this class, the basics of vocal technique are introduced with vocal warm-ups to help refresh and enliven the experience of the choral and ensemble singer. Topics can be tailored to the specific needs and repertory of the group, such as:
Posture in Sitting & Standing
Diction: clarifying the articulators used in speech and song
Ensemble Techniques: Blend and Vowel Matching
Florid Style & Articulation in Baroque Music
Gesture & Phrasing in Renaissance Polyphony
Karen has presented these topics and coached numerous choral arts organizations, such as, Pacific Mozart Ensemble, Seattle Medieval Women's Choir, Mostly Motets, Sonoma Bach, the Camerata Choir of Grace Cathedral, the Chamber Singers at University of California, Berkeley. In January 2012 Karen leads a Fifteenth Century Polyphony workshop titled, "Tinctoris Five," at Stanford University.