VoiceBox

Concetta Tomaino, executive director and co-founder of the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function in New York and Indre Viskontas, a Bay Area-based opera singer with a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles in cognitive neuroscience, discuss the profound connection between our minds and voices.

Helene Whitson, director of the Bay Area Choral Music Archive, digs deep into the depths of her enormous choral music collection to share some of the global choral music scene’s most difficult-to-come-by recordings.

Monika Jalili, an American vocalist specializing in the Persian repertoire, and Briget Boyle, a singer of Irish extraction who is a member of the acclaimed Balkan vocal ensemble Kitka, explore the triumphs and challenges of singing the repertoire of cultures far removed from their own.

Chloe, Erika and Rachel Tietjen of the T Sisters, an Oakland-based singing group, together with vocalist Melody Walker, talk about how voices can create lush harmonic vistas.

Concert presenter Therese Davis (aka Ms Momo), who founded The Songbird Festival in 2009 to celebrate local vocal artists, discusses some of her favorite Bay Area vocal acts.

VoiceBox celebrates Woody Guthrie's centennial birthday with conversation and song when Peter Glazer, professor of Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and creator of the stage show Woody Guthrie's American Song, shares his thoughts on the seminal American folk artist.

Bob Geary, who heads up The Golden Gate International Children’s and Youth Choral Festival, shares the music of youth choirs participating in this year’s event from China, the United States, Indonesia, Georgia and other countries.

Laryngologist Mark Courey and voice pathologist Sarah Schneider explain what happens when professional singers undergo voice surgery from the operating theater to the all-important rehab process. Program generously underwritten by The American Speech Language Hearing Association (ASHA).

Fach, a method for classifying a classically trained singer’s vocal “type,” can be both a blessing and a curse to a singer’s career. The San Francisco Opera Center’s Sheri Greenawald discusses the workings of fach and how it can change over the course of a vocalist’s lifetime.

Actresses Barbra Streisand and Meryl Streep are the main focus of a discussion about great actors who also happen to be great singers with Chad Jones, theatre critic and performing arts blogger, and vocalist Ann Hampton Callaway. Program generously underwritten by The San Francisco Symphony.