Introduction

Here is the Crescendo Music Education Podcast – Episode 146.

This podcast is being recorded on the lands of the Turrbal people. I acknowledge them as the traditional owners of the land and pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging. They were the first music makers on this land.

About ‘Read the Episode’: Sometimes, we would rather skim visually than listen to a podcast! That’s a great way to learn too!
The transcript of episode 146 of The Crescendo Music Education Podcast is below.

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Debbie O’Shea 

Welcome to the Crescendo Music Education Podcast Kate Schirmer. Hello Kate.

Kate Schirmer 

Hello. It’s so nice to be here. Thank you for having me.

Debbie O’Shea 

Oh, I’m delighted to have you and I’m really looking forward to getting to know you a little bit better.

Kate Schirmer 

Wonderful.

Debbie O’Shea 

I’m going to start with your brief bio and I’m sure there could be plenty more you add, so I’ll just give this summary to people who haven’t met you. Well, here we go. Kate Schirmer graduated from the University of Queensland in 2004, oh goodness, you’re just a baby.

Kate Schirmer 

I was just going to say that sounds like a really long time ago.

Kate’s Bio

Debbie O’Shea 

Look who you’re talking to Kate. With a Bachelor of Music with first class honours majoring in vocal performance and from the Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University in 2015 with a Master of Music studies in Vocal Pedagogy. Kate is a highly experienced singing teacher and currently works at Griffith University, where she teaches singing and lectures in materials of music at the Queensland Academy of Excellence in Musical Theater.

Kate Schirmer 

What a mouthful.

Debbie O’Shea 

I know, it’s a mouthful, isn’t it? Tell them to get a shorter name. And teaches acting through song within the Bachelor of Acting at the Conservatorium as well. Kate currently conducts the Queensland Show Choir’s young adult ensemble, VoiceWorks and acts as Artistic Director. She has presented both nationally and internationally to singers, teachers, choristers and actors and is in demand as an adjudicator. Kate is a proud member of the Australian National Association of Teachers of Singing, very affectionately known as ANATS and she served on the Queensland chapter committee for many years, including as president. In 2021 she received an award for outstanding service from the organisation.

Kate Schirmer 

There’s lots of acronyms in there, but if you spread out those acronyms, they become quite burdensome quite quickly, don’t they?

Debbie O’Shea 

We just get used to them. When you move in certain circles, we never say University of Queensland.

Kate Schirmer 

Exactly.

Debbie O’Shea 

Anyway. So listening to that brief bio, what would you add? Is there something you’d like to add to that, or highlight?

Kate’s Highlights

Kate Schirmer 

I think the thing that I’d like to add is that there’s not much about my sort of performance or my singing life in there, because my professional life does sort of live in that music education sphere a lot more these days. But I thought I’d sort of start by telling you who I am as a musician, because that’s important to back up everything else that we’re doing. And I’ve had this jack of all trades, probably master of none, sort of career where I did study classical voice initially and was brought up singing classically, but just had this sort of very wide listening sphere and was brought up on lots of different kinds of music and could never quite pin down who I wanted to be as a performer, so I just decided to do everything.

So I’ve sung in corporate cover bands, I’ve sung with Jazz big bands. I’ve done singer songwriter and world music work. I have done cabaret, I’ve done stand up comedy. Really, I think all of those experiences and something that I’ll talk about later is that idea of just experiencing art and music widely is something that’s really important to me. I guess you can’t write all that in a bio, but it’s about that sort of experience of music in lots of different ways and that training and retraining and lots of different voice styles. I think although it’s not a good thing to put or an easy thing to put in a bio, I’m really proud of that and I love that element of my artistic life, so I thought I’d chuck that in there.

Debbie O’Shea 

It sounds difficult to me. It sounds like the sort of thing you would have to just continually keep learning and developing.

Kate Schirmer 

Absolutely. But it’s also something that makes me happy, because I have a general curiosity about what the voice can do and also about musical style and what style is and what makes something sound authentic. So I guess it’s where my brain gets interested in things as well. I think it’s really important as a teacher to experience things on your own voice if you’re going to be telling others how to set that up on their voices. So I do it because I really like it and maybe because I have a short attention span, but also I think it does make you a better educator and just makes life more interesting, really.

Debbie O’Shea 

Yes, so you’re a musician yourself. You consider yourself a musician?

Kate Schirmer 

Yes.

Debbie O’Shea 

You also are a music educator. You’re also a singer, you’re also a conductor, you’re all those things. If I said you have to just pick one, what would you be?

Kate’s Choice

Kate Schirmer 

I don’t consider a musician and a singer as being different from each other. So I guess I’d say a musician and I’m constantly saying to my musicianship students at the academy, at QAEMT, don’t just be a singer, be a musician. That you can’t be a singer without being a muso and vice versa, or at least not a good one.

Debbie O’Shea 

Yes and I feel often, I’m just taking a slight side track here, but when I’ve done musicianship, especially aural musicianship, with instrumentalists I think it’s really important that they see themselves as musicians with aural and hopefully some vocal skills, not just as a music technician.

Kate Schirmer 

Absolutely I couldn’t agree with you more and from both perspectives. I think if as singers we learn how to listen more critically, or as one of my beautiful mentors and conductors Reika would say, listen to the music vertically rather than horizontally is what she used to say. That enriches a million different things from what is the composer trying to make you feel by using this chord or this motif to just being a more sensitive ensemble member, which is just good practice I think.

Debbie O’Shea 

Yes, absolutely and I love that. And yes, Reika is beautiful. It’s not easy to think vertically, listen and think vertically as well as horizontally. It takes a lot of work, doesn’t it?

Kate Schirmer 

Absolutely, yeah.

Debbie O’Shea 

Since we started talking about people, I like to whenever I have a guest to talk about gratitude, I think it’s very important. So for what are you most grateful, including people, professionally and personally?

Gratefulness

Kate Schirmer 

This one, when you sent me some of the guide questions. This one was a long answer. So sorry. I’m glad to have lots to be grateful for. And the first thing that came to mind straight away is I’m really grateful to have been brought up in a home and in a family where singing and music was part of the furniture. It was normalised. It wasn’t that such and such was a good singer and such and such was a bad singer.

We all sang in my family, we all experienced music. We sang around the dinner table. We listened to a lot of music. My dad does a great Louis Armstrong impression and used to do that at dinner time. My sisters both play piano and guitar and we used to sing together a lot as kids, my little brother and I used to make up theme tunes for our imagination games, which were very, very daggy indeed.

But I’ve come to know that that is not everybody’s experience of the world so I’m incredibly grateful for that. I think based on the type of personality I had, if that hadn’t been normalised, I probably would have been too scared to ever consider that to be a viable career path. But because it’s always been a part of my life, it didn’t feel like something that was not available to me. So I’m really, really grateful to that experience. Secondly, I’ve just had amazing teachers and mentors throughout my life. I would start with my Grade One teacher whose name was Amanda Rogers, she had hair exactly like yours Debbie actually, it used to change colour a lot and she would always sing with us every afternoon, usually on a guitar. We would do Under The Boardwalk.

We would do lots of little pop songs and songs out of those old ABC Sing books and I just adored her. I adored her. So she was my first sort of experience of that beyond my family and then sort of to skip ahead to when my family moved up to Bundaberg in regional Queensland. I had a brilliant piano teacher who is still alive, her name’s Elaine Stebhens and she was just the exact person that I needed, because she wasn’t about the exams and the eisteddfods, but she was about everything that we’re for, creating practical experiences of music. So if I brought in the Moonlight Sonata to play, she’d be like, Yeah, all right, but you have to play the other two bits too.

Or if I brought in a lead sheet and I was like, what are the little chords above there? How do I do that? She would do that with me. It made me a way better sight reader, a way better groove player and it has allowed me to become quite a useful pianist. I always say, not good, but useful. So I’m very grateful to her. My singing teacher, Robyn Edgar, who I’m still in contact with through ANATS things now. She was also an extremely practical and a really curious person to learn from and she was very supportive of getting me and a couple of other girls who were around at the same time where we wanted to go.

Kate Schirmer 

Then I skip ahead again and I go to uni years were just, I’m so grateful. First of all, I’m grateful to myself, because it was always sort of The Con, The Con, The Con. The Con was new and shiny when I went to uni and very much, from a Bundaberg standpoint, it was that or nothing. So I was very much that’s where I wanted to go, because that’s where I thought I would go. But I had a friend, Margaret Tesch-Muller, who was at UQ and she said, No, come and do this audition as well and so I did. Just through my experience of those two auditions, I could tell immediately that I wasn’t supposed to be at The Con. I was really supposed to be at UQ.

I just felt it from the audition and I went home and I changed my preferences and I didn’t tell anybody that I’d done it and that is very unlike me. So I don’t know if it was the I usually do what I’m told, but there would be many people who would disagree with that statement, probably a few people who are listening to this. But it was really clear to me that this was going to be the right spot and it absolutely was, those years at UQ were so philosophical in terms of my learning, in terms of finding my tribe of people. I am so grateful that I made that decision that was an absolute game changer for me and I don’t think that I would have had the career that I’ve had, or the enjoyment of the career that I’ve had without that time.

Both the educators of course, I’m sure Dr James Cuskelly comes up quite a lot on this podcast, but also Leslie Purvis, who was my singing teacher, who, again, is the reason that I’m a singing teacher and my best friend Jennifer Teh, who I met two days in and we’ve been best mates ever since. I could name lots of other people, but I’ll leave that there. Then in my working life I think that again I’ve sort of tried to take that idea of being a teacher student, a lifelong learner, into my professional life.

So I’m so grateful for my students, who many of whom have become my colleagues and my friends and I’ve been able to mentor them, but I’ve always sought out mentorship for myself in any role that I’ve been in from lots and lots of different people, but I just feel really blessed that I seem to wherever I go, be able to find these like minded people who can enrich my work, my teaching and help me to keep moving forward. Because as you know Debbie, it’s a hard job this one, it can be tricky. So I feel grateful for that too. So I think that’s it. Oh, my husband’s quite nice too.

Debbie O’Shea 

Yes, yes, yes, you should mention him, I think.

Kate Schirmer 

Shout out, yeah, shout out to him. He’s great and very supportive.

Debbie O’Shea 

But you are absolutely right. You need all of these people to keep your boat afloat, don’t you?

Keep Your Boat Afloat

Kate Schirmer 

Absolutely? Yeah, for sure.

Debbie O’Shea 

The longer I’m in this game, the more I realise if you’re not a lifelong learner, you’re not going to last.

Kate Schirmer 

Absolutely, yeah, I agree with that. It doesn’t matter which stream of the arts you’re in either, performer, teacher, composer, musicologist, whatever. Yeah, we’re dead in the water if we stop being curious.

Debbie O’Shea 

Yes, yes, there’s none of that curiosity killed the cat. This cat needs the curiosity.

Kate Schirmer 

Absolutely.

Debbie O’Shea 

Actually, there’s a song in that, the end of curiosity killed the cat, well let’s just turn that up. Now I know the next subject is something that you don’t like talking about. We’re going to talk singing (laughs).

Kate Schirmer 

Oh dear.

Debbie O’Shea 

You’ve already said several things about singing. Obviously, it’s your soul and your heart and all of those things. Just wondering about how important is it to you to work in the area? Because it could be your hobby. You could do something else and perform in groups in the evening. You know, something to feed your soul. So why do you think it’s important to work in this area?

Feeding Your Soul

Kate Schirmer 

Gosh, it’s a real cliche but there is that sort of thing of, if you can do something else, you should do that. I’ve honestly just never found anything, even going right back to being a young person, I just always saw my life in music. And I’ll tell a funny story first, when my parents were cleaning out their house when they retired, they found this thing that I’d written in about Grade One or Two and it was all about what you wanted to be when you grew up.

I said that I wanted to sing like Ariel, The Little Mermaid, so that people clap for me. Very narcissistic. This is the bit that I still find hilarious to this day because I was six and I wanted to marry Tom Cruise because Cocktail was my favourite movie. Definitely, not a film that I’d seen. I don’t know where that came from.

Debbie O’Shea 

You must have at least seen the shorts.

Kate Schirmer 

I think we had the record of the soundtrack. I think it was that. I also have older brothers and sisters, like quite a bit older brothers and sisters and I was always trying to be very grown up and sophisticated, so I’m sure that had something to do with it too. I’ve now realised at the age of 41 that I will never be grown up nor sophisticated.

Debbie O’Shea 

Nor marry Tom Cruise.

Kate Schirmer 

No thanks. With the benefit of hindsight, I think it was a very wise decision on my part.

Debbie O’Shea 

Who is by the way my age I believe.

Kate Schirmer 

There you go, you might have had more of a shot with him Debbie.

Debbie O’Shea 

Yeah, yeah. Shout out to my husband who is lovely. Thank you.

Kate Schirmer 

I bet he is, even if he has never jumped on a couch for you on Oprah.

Debbie O’Shea 

No, no. I did rather like the early Tom Cruise.

Kate Schirmer 

Absolutely, absolutely, a very nice smile. I agree. Anyway, back to singing. One of the things that makes me excited to work as a singing teacher I think is that I think music always came fairly naturally to me. I would even say that piano came more naturally to me than singing did, I actually struggled as a singer. I’m a bit of an overthinker, a bit of an overintellectualiser and sometimes that can be really bad with singing, because a lot of singing is a flow and an absence of feeling and a sense of embodiment.

This is something that I try and tell my students all the time, but I think that I always wanted to show how much I was trying and mechanise it all and I would actually get into some scrapes with my singing. I had a lot of tongue root tension. I also had, as I’m sure you can all hear on the podcast, I have a big boomy mezzo voice and that took a long time to settle, especially as a classical singer. I think I was always quite impatient for that to happen and would then push and be too big and wild and wooly.

So I think one of the reasons that my professional life has gone into singing teaching, is because I think that once you’ve struggled with something yourself, you become much better at teaching it. You become more aware of what the problems are. You become more empathetic to some of the struggles that a singer might have. I’ve never lost my love of just tinkering and solving those problems and helping a singer to achieve what they want to achieve with their sound. But I also really like the holistic nature of singing, as opposed to anything else.

It’s that sort of body, mind and spirit connection. Singers are given that gift of text, as you read in my bio, that acting through song element is really important to me in my musical theater work, that idea of understanding and bringing out the text and understanding what the composer has done with it to assist you to do what needs to be done. Then those kinds of brain body connections I find endlessly fascinating as well and how to make those more consistent. I think the other thing that I love about working and singing is that one on one relational stuff.

My happy place is in the studio with a student, building that rapport and that trust in each other and then helping that student to learn to trust their instrument and take that forward. I’ve never found anything I want to do as much as that.

Debbie O’Shea 

Yeah, that makes sense. It’s a very personal thing, isn’t it? Voice. You can feel quite vulnerable.

Kate Schirmer 

Yeah. And I always say to my student that that’s the scary thing, but it’s also the magical thing, because when we’re sharing our vulnerability with each other as humans, that’s an exchange of energy that you’re not going to get anywhere else in the world and relationship that is actually really, really special. So all at once, it’s frightening to put yourself out there and to work with something as personal as your voice, but it’s also what we crave I think, as performers and as musicians, is that sharing and that relationship in that moment where you’re working with another musician or another group of musicians, there’s a relationship there. Then that one that you have in the moment with the audience as well.

Debbie O’Shea 

Yes. I love what you said about learning to sing not coming super easy to you, making you a better educator. And I think most of the listeners now are probably think of someone who is just such a natural talent that they’re not necessarily the best teacher because they don’t have, you use the word empathy, but even understanding of what you actually have to go through. So that’s interesting to hear.

Kate Schirmer 

I’ve worked with teachers in the past, singing teachers in the past, as a student, who do have that kind of, well, just make this noise and sometimes you can try and make the noise, but I’m such a why and how and whatever person and sometimes that’s not good. Sometimes just make the noise, I get that. But I remember saying to a teacher once, I can make the noise if you make it, I can parrot it back to you.

But as soon as I walk out of here, I’m not going to be able to do it. Like, I don’t know how I’m making it and we had a fight about that I remember, not a fight, but they were a bit grumpy with me for asking for more information, well just feel it. And I’m like, Well, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be feeling. I don’t know if it feels good or bad, or can we talk about that? No, just make the noise. That’s not how I teach at all.

Debbie O’Shea 

It sounds like you’re an amazing teacher. Oh my goodness. But I tell you what I’m like, in awe of the fact that you can do all of these different techniques and can actually do it when most of us are struggling to even sing nicely in tune, just with one voice. So tell me about the difference between working with vocal and choral technique for classical verse contemporary or musical theater. How you sing for the style and lead your choristers. So not just you doing it, but leading your choristers to sing the style?

Sing The Style

Kate Schirmer 

There’s lots in that and it’s sort of a two pronged thing. So if we’re talking vocal techniques specifically, there are certain elements of vocal technique that are consistent no matter what style you’re singing. You need to be aligned in your body. You need to be breathing for the task. Now that might be slightly different, but the physiology and anatomy of that is the same and you need to have some understanding about the production of the sound. So I guess that sort of activation of the breath, the vibration of the vocal folds is free, and then the resonance comes from there.

But then apart from that, it’s very different being a classical singer, for example, versus a pop and contemporary singer and some of those things are technical things. In classical we value that balance of vowel shapes, we value legato line, longer breath groups and consistent even sound from top to bottom, that’s the technical side again. There’s also probably a registration difference as well. In contemporary we value uniqueness of tone, then we want to be conversational for example. In contemporary it’s very much about those style elements, because we bundle all of these different styles within this contemporary commercial music (CCM) but like, that’s everything from those indie kind of cursive whisper singers like Angus and Julia Stone, to Screamo and full on vocal effects.

You’re not going to teach those two artists in the same way, but you they need to understand how to make the sounds that they want to make safely and also know all of the tips and tricks to make it perhaps sound like it’s harder than it is, because of course in contemporary music there’s amplification, there’s mixing, there’s all of those sorts of things that you can play with, that might give the effect of something that’s a lot bigger or edgier than it actually is in terms of how it comes across on stage.

Then in musical theater I guess I found myself in the music theater realm. What I love about it is you have to do all sorts of different things. There’s actually a really broad scope that can take you quite close to classical, that can take you quite close to rock and then there’s this sort of speech quality that happens in the middle where we spend most of our time, because the text is the most important thing in musical theater, that’s what’s driving the story forward and then style sits underneath that.

Kate Schirmer 

To understand that as a teacher, as an artist, as a practitioner, musician, first thing is listen widely and listen critically. I think if I’m going back to my grateful thing before, we always had music on but we would listen to the music, it wasn’t that we had it on in the background. It would be something that I always engaged with and thought about what was I listening for? What was the groove? Why did this sound good?

Again that’s just my natural curiosity I think, because that then leads from the technique into the style. Style is, I feel like we get that wrong a lot, especially as choral practitioners. One of my, let’s not call it a pet peeve. One thing that I don’t enjoy listening to is a sort of contemporary arrangement of a pop song being sung by a choir, but it just sounds like a classical choir singing a contemporary song, like there’s been no effort made to bring that style element in.

So I guess when I’m teaching my choirs, I treat every song as a little bit different from each other. If we’re doing a music theater song, then we often say the words first and we say them to the rhythm and we find the natural prosody. It might be a call and response thing. We place the consonants and then we talk about, well what does that mean? That’s something that I do a lot in my choir. Who is this person? What’s happening?

If it’s a pop song, we always start with groove, something I learned from Pete Churchill, on beat off beat, on beat off beat. We all do it together and then we find where’s the groove? Then we’ll place the sounds into that groove and then we add the notes and then we add the harmony. We’ll find the through line of the melody first and then add the harmony. We’ll find where the consonants need to be softened or brought forward a little bit more. Whereas if we’re doing a traditional classical piece, it’s going to be about placing the phrases and the breaths and listening to the dynamics and all of that kind of thing. And when I was thinking about this, I was like, what’s important to me in my choral sound? And it’s never been that important to me personally.

This might be a controversial opinion, don’t know. That my choir all sound super duper uniform, as in, I don’t adjust my choir sound to be one sound that you could say, that is Kate’s choir. I think we change it up for the song. But what I do really drive into them is that idea of when we are singing together we agree, this is an act of consensus. Again, that’s what makes choral singing magic, because we are listening to each other in a way that we wouldn’t do if we were singing by ourselves.

So sometimes I will say, and thankfully, I’ve got my choir nice and well trained. I did this last night. I just said, we all need to agree on what R vowel we’re doing there. Try again. I didn’t tell them which R vowel to do. I just got them to listen and then suddenly it was what I wanted it be.

Debbie O’Shea 

Wow.

Kate Schirmer 

It takes a bit of training.

Debbie O’Shea 

You might never get there with little kids.

Kate Schirmer 

No, they’re in a different spot. I’m very lucky. I work mostly with young adults but also that might not be the vibe with little kids, right? Do we want something that’s completely uniform with little kids anyway? Or are we building pulse? Are we building those incredibly important foundational music techniques, because that’s what I would be doing with the children’s choir, is teaching them just the steady pulse underneath and how the rhythm works on top of that. Then how to create something that’s tuneful on top of that. All of that wonderful methodology that if I ever get someone in my studio or in my class, in my choir who’s had a great musical education background, I’m like, Oh, thank god, you can do all that, it’s wonderful.

Debbie O’Shea 

Yes, because it does have to be taught. I love it.

Kate Schirmer 

It needs to be structured. What I often find with the sort of broad range of music theory knowledge. Of course, all of my students who are at the academy, they’re auditioned, they’re very good at what they do. They’re talented. But what I find in theory is that you could have someone who has an excellent really well structured musical education and they’re at a really high level. You’ll have someone who has had really good skills developed in one area and then has completely missed something else and then it’s about filling in the gaps for that person and helping them to find what’s missing.

Debbie O’Shea 

Yes, yes, and I imagine working within a choir too, of course, one of my things is aural skills, it does help tremendously if they’ve had good aural training.

Kate Schirmer 

Absolutely and my choir is a community choir. It’s not auditioned. So we get anyone that wants to come and sing. You just take people where they’re at and that could be anything.

Debbie O’Shea 

Well, and it probably is anything.

Kate Schirmer 

Yeah, of course and that’s fine.

Debbie O’Shea 

Wonderful.

Sign-Off

Thank you for joining me for this podcast. Don’t forget, you’ll find the show notes and transcript and all sorts of information on crescendo.com.au. If you’ve enjoyed the podcast or found it valuable, you might like to rate it on your podcast player and leave a review. I’d really appreciate it if you did. All I can be as the best version of me. All you can do is be the best you. Until next time, bye.

Just for Laughs

As we know, laughter relieves stress, don’t lose sight of the funny side of life.
Why did the barber win the race? Obviously because he knew all the short cuts!

Links Mentioned in the Episode:

📜 Crescendo Music Education Podcast | Episode 146

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