An interview with Cate

When did you decide to become a voice teacher?

I began singing in choirs when I was 5 years old, directing and accompanying choirs when I was 13 and teaching piano when I was 16.

I think teaching chose me!

This was way before musical theater was popular and wasn’t even a remote option in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania community where I grew up. I began performing in public around age 9.

I played and studied many instruments, wore a groove in my Jesus Christ Superstar album, sang Handel's Messiah four times by the time I was 15, and saved babysitting money to take acting classes at Point Park College. Also, my family—parents, several grandparents, brothers and various cousins, were all either professional or accomplished amateur musicians. My grandfather, a jazz drummer, used to practice his riffs on my head with his fingers! So by the time I chose to focus on voice in college I had an amazing musical background.

In grad school I was at the University of Maryland with the likes of baritone Gordon Hawkins and soprano Alessandra Marc, but even then my goal was to be a teacher. I have always been passionately interested in helping people "find their voice." I am also dedicated to helping professional singers meet the considerable physical, mental and emotional demands of their craft.

Did you ever run into road blocks to your musical interests?

I am fortunate in that my parents understood and supported me. However, in the academic world there is the view that if you want to teach, you are less of a performer. Over the years I have had to develop the inner resources to accept that fact that I was a musical geek: I was interested in voice science and the psychology of singing as it relates to the passion of making music long before others recognized the importance of these things.

Who, and/or what are your major influences?

Well, the artistic influences are too numerous to name, but would include the greats in all facets of music from classical to pop… Great authors, poets, journalists… Dancers and choreographers of all styles…The world of folk art, especially Art Quilts…And the world of theater, which, for me, is a scary place because I come to theater as a musician. But I have grown immensely through exploring my own locked emotions through theater work and through experiencing theater as an audience member. These things all influence who I am as a person and therefore, as a teacher.

I have to include my family, husband, children and close friends. These are the people who have helped to weave the fabric of my every day life, and who have stayed by my side through some very thick and some very thin.

I learned from my parents that teaching music and making music are gifts to be given back to the world.

Do you have a major primary artistic "success?"

Definitely Adam and Angela, our kids! (Grins) And in the arts, I’d have to include students who won contracts in Broadway shows, Cirque de Soleil, Washington National Opera, Ensemble Theater of Cincinnati, etc., as well as those people just learning to match pitch. And for me, personally, still singing after eight abdominal surgeries and regaining a zest for life has been a whole artistic success in itself! These experiences taught me how the body works with the mind and the heart.

You still can't get the hang of...

Telling jokes. I start to smile at the beginning, crack myself up and totally blow the punch line. Our son spent the summer trying to teach me how to deadpan telling a joke and I was hopeless. But I sure laughed trying!

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