Associate Professor of Music
Karen Leigh-Post, DMA, in keeping with the liberal arts tradition, has engaged in interdisciplinary studies throughout her performing and teaching career. Her extensive study of the interaction of mind and body includes first-hand work with notable innovators in singing-acting, movement, and performance psychology such as Wesley Balk, Barbara Conable, and Alma Thomas, and extends to cognitive neuroscience and functional anatomy. An active clinician, Ms. Leigh-Post has been invited to present her research in Cognitive Bodily-Kinesthetic Awareness (CKA) and Singing, and An Ideal Performing State and Recurring Vestibular Stimulation Theory at National Conferences of the National Association of Teachers of Singing (2010 and 2012 respectively), and looks forward to the release of Mind-Body Awareness for Singers: Unleashing Optimal Performance in an Ideal Performing State (2013) by Plural Publishing.
As a performer, European critics described Karen Leigh’s Carmen as “a very attractive heroine with a striking mezzo soprano” and commended the “well-formed supple lines of her Venus” (Tannhäuser) while the New York Times declared, “Karen Leigh sang extremely well” in the premier of Animalen, and her dramatic portrayal of Maria Callas (Master Class) was heralded as “brilliant in her depth of character, her pacing, her facial expressions, her gestures….” Additional credits include Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Fledermaus, Cosi fan Tutte, Le Nozze di Figaro, Madama Butterfly, Hänsel und Gretel, The Mikado, A Death in the Family, West Side Story, and Die Dreigroschenoper. Ms. Leigh’s concert appearances include several PBS broadcasts, from the tradition of Mozart with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra to the songs and arias of Bernstein at Lincoln Center, and embrace the intimate chamber works of Loeffler, Respighi, and Ibert as well as the orchestral settings of Ravel’s Shéhérazade and Martin’s Cornet, to name but a few.
Her commitment to the promotion of American art music and its composers has reached as near as New York for the premiere of Alan Cohen’s chamber cycle, A Clover and One Bee and as far as Budapest and the Czech Republic with the songs of John Benson. Most notable, however, is her ground-breaking anthology American Art Song for the Sacred Service featuring more than twenty new songs by as many composers, including Stephen Paulus, Libby Larsen, and Lori Laitman (Leigh-Post, ed., Classical Vocal Reprints).
Ms. Leigh-Post earned the Doctor of Musical Arts under the tutelage of master teacher Shirlee Emmons at Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts. Other coaches and teachers include Warren Jones, Joan Dornemann, Judith Nicosia and Emma Small. She joined the faculty of the Lawrence University Conservatory of Music in 1996. She is especially pleased to note that alumni from her studio enjoy active careers, performing with notable opera companies, symphonies, and ensembles such as the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the New York Philharmonic, and Chanticleer.
Contact by e-mail: karen.leigh-post@lawrence.edu
Karen Leigh-Post's Web Page
Voice Department Page
