Become a vocal athlete as you learn to expand your range, tone, and musicianship with the voice studio of Julia Dawson.
Now teaching exclusively online, you can access lessons from anywhere in the world.
First we warm up our bodies and our breath. Unlike other instruments that we can carry in a bag and then leave at home when we are finished playing them, our bodies are our instrument in singing. It’s important to wake up the breathing muscles and align posture so that we can allow our musculature to work freely.
Next we warm up our voice with scales and vocalises.
Finally, we work on repertoire! Learning a song or aria needs to be broken down into several steps: rhythm, note-learning, analyzing the text/poetry, researching the historical context in which the composer wrote the music, developing your character and acting skills, and finally when all this is done, singing the song! In this way we can create the richest possible performance.
Canadian mezzo soprano Julia Dawson is a passionate arts educator and performer. She holds a Bachelor of Music in vocal performance from Oberlin Conservatory, home to the Otto B. Schoepfle Vocal Arts Laboratory that contains stroboscopic and fiber-optic instrumentation that can display four types of vocal analyses concurrently, allowing examination of both the function and the timbre of the artistic singing voice and founded by renown vocal pedagogue Richard Miller. It was here that Julia began her journey with vocal pedagogy. She went on to earn a Master of Music in vocal performance from Rice University, and a Performance Diploma from the prestigious opera school the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia. She has performed internationally with Oper Frankfurt, the Munich Philharmonic, the Paris Radio Orchestra, the Santa Fe Opera, the Aspen Music Festival, The Glimmerglass Festival, and at the Kennedy Center on the opera, concert, and recital stages.
As a keen practitioner of meditation, Julia is passionate about combining her expertise in vocal pedagogy with mindfulness practices to help her students cultivate mental and physical awareness for success both onstage and off. Based in Germany, she is passionate about working with voice students from all over the world.