After more than 50 years of teaching singers how to breathe, stand, and open their throats, Kathryn Kasper has written down her method. Her new book, Singing: A Technical Guide, is a comprehensive manual that treats the voice as an instrument that can be systematically trained, regardless of genre. The book's release matters because it consolidates decades of empirical, feel-based teaching into a single resource at a time when vocal pedagogy is often fragmented across classical, Broadway, and popular styles.
Kasper's approach is rooted in anatomy and sensation. Across 19 chapters, she walks through the entire singing system from the diaphragm up. Early chapters treat inhalation and support as a coordinated athletic event involving the diaphragm, external intercostals, and upper abdominals. Later chapters map the vocal tract, from the larynx and tongue to the lips, hard palate, and jaw. The middle chapters tackle what Kasper calls 'the fundamental,' the raw sound created at the vocal folds before the vocal tract shapes it into language. She revisits this concept from multiple angles, adding layers such as vowel projection, resonance tuning, and the relationship between harmonics.
The book is also personal. Kasper recounts a humbling lesson in resonance when a doctoral teacher told her he did not hear much of it in her voice. That moment sent her on a years-long search that eventually led to an old Italian method involving inhaling through the mouth while smelling a flower. Such anecdotes illustrate her central argument: that vocal technique is learnable through empirical, feel-based teaching, a tradition she traces through William Vennard, Richard Miller, Joan Wall, Robert Caldwell, and Theodore Dimon.
What sets Singing: A Technical Guide apart is its unified system. Kasper addresses registration and the passaggio transitions that trip up nearly every developing singer, favoring the glissando as a primary tool for smoothing breaks. She is direct about the fact that popular singers, Broadway performers, and classical vocalists all share the same underlying technique even when their choices about register mixing differ. The book covers the International Phonetic Alphabet for English, melisma, interpolation, and runs, with attention to both Baroque ornamentation and contemporary popular style. Final chapters address pitch matching, singing in tune in the upper register, vibrato problems, TMJ, and covering the voice.
Kasper's teaching career spans continents. Born in Lima, Ohio, in 1940, she grew up in a Mennonite family that sang in four-part harmony before she ever set foot in a formal music classroom. She earned a Music Education degree from Bethel College and a Master of Music in Voice from Wichita State University. A Fulbright fellowship took her and her husband, Arlo, to Wiesbaden, Germany. She then spent three decades teaching voice at Bethel College before retiring in 2006. A second Fulbright brought the couple to the UniNorte Opera Company in Asuncion, Paraguay, where they have lived for 20 years. During that time, Kasper helped prepare a 540-voice choir for the visit of Pope Francis in 2015. She continues to teach at university programs and privately across Paraguay.
The book reads the way Kasper teaches: information is repeated from chapter to chapter because, as she writes, 'repetition is how we learn.' Exercises appear at the end of most chapters, many drawn from real studio sessions, such as sit-ups while singing, wall squats for posture, lip trills for pitch matching, and the finger-in-front-of-the-nose trick for checking projection. The book is designed to work alongside Kasper's YouTube channel, where many exercises are demonstrated on video. For voice teachers, professional and amateur singers, pop soloists, and choir members, Singing: A Technical Guide offers a rare synthesis: a single unified system that covers classical, Broadway, and popular technique, insisting that while the system is not simple, it is learnable.
