Coach/Conductor Corner is a new feature of NOA Now that brings readers into conversation with distinguished conductors, coaches, and pianists from across the opera industry. The series is designed to provide practical insight and professional guidance drawn directly from leading artists in the field. To suggest a future guest or contribute ideas for the series, please contact J. Bradley Baker.

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About Kathleen Kelly: Kathleen Kelly’s practice combines her skills as pianist, coach, conductor, writer, and advocate. During the 2025-26 season, she joined both Jamie Barton and Ryan McKinny in recitals, led the Texas premiere of Notes on Viardot for Baylor Opera Theater, and returned to the New National Theater Opera Studio in Tokyo to lead performances of Gianni Schicchi. She also introduced the groundbreaking Collaborative Piano Playbook for the International Keyboard Collaborative Arts Society with co-author Elvia Puccinelli.

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Recent notable projects include her chapter on current industry practice for Chanda Vanderhart’s book Accompaniment in America, her acclaimed recording Force of Nature with soprano Emily Albrink, and her performance in the filmed opera Interstate. Her international performing credits include appearances at Wigmore Hall, Weill Hall, Zankel Hall, the Kennedy Center, Spivey Hall, and Vienna’s Musikverein. She has been part of the musical teams at the San Francisco, Metropolitan, Houston Grand, and Vienna State Operas, and is a regular guest coach for the New National Theater Tokyo Opera Studio. Her work has been published in VAN Magazine and The Journal of Singing. She is the Director of the Vocal Studies Division at Baylor University.

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Brad: Kathy, thanks for spending some time! Let’s begin by talking about coaching techniques that you feel have been especially effective.

Kathleen: The most interesting part of coaching for me is partnering with a vocalist to identify what they already do, and what steps to take from there. What is their relationship to pulse? to their ear and intonation? to language? Coaching is the process by which we develop techniques to gain skill, mastery, and ultimately maximum flexibility in rhythm, intonation, and expression.

 

Singers can apply that flexibility and subtlety to anything. Working in this partnered way can develop the kind of artistry in which a singer working with other musicians can bring a highly refined understanding of their relationship to the total harmony, to ensemble vowel sounds, and to pulse. An artist with real granular understanding of their role within the whole can manipulate any one of those elements in the service of expression.

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I’m always blown away when I hear singers who can do this, especially with rhythm and pulse—we don’t talk enough about it in classical singing! I admire people who can sing slightly ahead of the beat to increase vitality, excitement, or tension, or slightly behind the beat to create an atmosphere of reluctance, sadness, grief, or fatigue. Many artists treat intonation unintentionally, but there are singers who can absolutely choose to sing on the upper side of pitch in order to ratchet up tension, or slightly below pitch to communicate a doleful affect. Or perhaps they intentionally scoop into a pitch for an expressive reason—I love to talk about portamento as late 19th-century ornamentation! Ultimately, all these expressive devices can be broken down into basic building blocks: rhythm, harmony, pitch, and timbre. The joy of coaching for me is helping singers turn those building blocks into expressive technique.

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Brad: How has your understanding of coaching changed over the course of your career? 

Kathleen: When I began, what I primarily saw coaches doing—something that has been especially important in opera, particularly in North America—was communicating the performance traditions of the repertoire, and refining language. And we needed that in a nation with so few live performances relative to the population. The traditions did need to be taught, and language did need to be refined. Also, the coaching I saw was all within big opera house machinery—very git-er-done—and I learned so much from expert coaches who could just get right down to brass tacks and help people do the thing.

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It can be very challenging for musicians to find time for granular work, particularly in a house where coaching is applied punitively, or where the music staff is stretched to their limit—I wish both of those things were rare. The least interesting—and potentially most toxic—kind of coaching can arise when you only have time to say, “this is the right answer.” The kind of coaching I love has time to say, “I’m your partner in building your full instrument, which includes your unique mind and ear.” And if we can take time for this, it changes all the other conversations down the road. We have to make time.

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Brad: What you’re describing is developing a refined sense of pitch, timing, and how your individual artistry relates to the whole: that an E-natural is not always the same E-natural, for example. A pitch can be slightly sharp or slightly low, or it might even change over the course of being sustained.

Kathleen: Right! Tuning to A440 or turning on Dr. Beat—great tools, but they’re just tools. Pitch and rhythm are more diplomacy than anything else. You think of the greatest, most independent artists—someone from opera like Maria Callas, or from pop music like Barbra Streisand—and how intentionally they use their relationship to pulse as part of the emotional landscape they inhabit. I think that’s worth analyzing.

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These days, the entire process of rehearsing has become so truncated. It’s ever more difficult to find room for the kinds of conversations I’m talking about.

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Brad: I think academia is where that can happen, because we have time to explore, within an artist’s developmental stages, how to activate this mindset in our students.

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If you’re trying to cultivate that mindset within a production setting, there often just isn’t enough time for artists to fully engage with it, or for that exploration to be truly helpful. In some ways, it can even become detrimental because there’s so little time to develop the refined hearing and subtle artistry needed to unlock its full potential.

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Do you find this subtle approach helpful in the case of diction as well? Is this something that changes depending on geographical location?

Kathleen: I’m old enough to remember diction courses before IPA (shocker!). When I was studying at Arizona State, there were voice teachers just starting to use this newfangled IPA, and others who had sung in Europe who would say, “These symbols aren’t the thing, you have to listen to learn what the language is like.”

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I would say both are right. Obviously, the symbol is not the sound, but the symbol is a gateway into a granular understanding of sound—like notated pitches and rhythms can’t tell you everything about how to play, but they sure are helpful starting places!

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I often think about William Bolcom discussing his representation of vernacular speech rhythms. He said that early in his career he realized that the more precisely he tried to represent the exact rhythms of speech, the further performers moved away from actual vernacular speech because the focus became execution of his notation rather than communication. What he said next was such a masterclass moment for me: “so I did what all the great vocal composers have always done. I wrote the simplest rhythm that was closest to what I wanted and then trusted people who know the language to do the right thing.”

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Brad: That’s wonderful, and it parallels the idea that diction is not about symbols, but about looking through the symbols toward language itself and the communication of ideas.

Kathleen: I agree. I think we can sometimes get lost in the weeds there. But I also think that, particularly in North America, young coaches are often placed in positions of authority—the person at the piano becomes “the corrector,” “the rule-bringer,” the person who says whether something was done well or poorly. Young coaches I work with talk about feeling that pressure, and young singers express a pressure to defer to pianists. So even if that paradigm isn’t communicated directly, it’s clearly being passed down.

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It was communicated directly to me. One of my mentors said, “You’re the pianist. You don’t get to make mistakes.” Another said, “Never admit that you’ve made a mistake! No one hires someone who doesn’t know their stuff.” What insurmountable pressure to put on someone who is still learning the profession. Coaches and collaborative pianists have a learning curve, even if our profession rarely supports it.

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Back to language: in North America we are generally behind the rest of the world linguistically. Basic pronunciation is only the first step toward putting language into a lyric instrument, which is a completely different physical process. But basic pronunciation is where we must start. Ultimately, singers need coaches who understand more than that. It all takes time.

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This is a very different conversation in Europe. Depending on where you are and whom you’re talking about, there can be a great tolerance for foreign accents—and often, the opposite is true. It’s such a local conversation. In Vienna, I often heard auditions with my two bosses—one a native German speaker and the other a native French speaker and they would hear American singers perform in those languages and remark, “They don’t understand a word.”

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I knew that wasn’t literally true. What they were missing, I think, was a kind of personal investment: the shaping of emphasis and nuance, the communication of something deep and personal that didn’t solely rely on the composition. I did start to wonder in Vienna if American singers’ concern with getting pronunciation “right” might stand in the way of that kind of expression. Not that I’m against excellent pronunciation!

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Brad: Yes, I agree. There is something palpably different when an artist truly understands how a phrase must be delivered to communicate. You referenced one of opera’s greatest communicators, Maria Callas, and I am certain she would wholeheartedly endorse the wonderful ideas you have shared with our readers.

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Thank you so much for sharing your expertise, and for all you have done—and continue to do—to inspire us all to greater heights.