Shirlee Emmons was educated at Lawrence University, later studying with the legendary soprano Elisabeth Schumann at the Curtis Institute and in Milano, Italy. She toured American and Canada with great tenor Lauritz Melchior, sang leading roles with the Santa Fe Opera and the NBC Opera, and has recorded for RCA Victor. She received an Obie (Off-Broadway Oscar) for her portrayal of Susan B. Anthony in Virgil Thomson’s Mother of Us All. During her 40-year teaching career, she has taught at Columbia, Princeton, Rutgers, and Boston Universities in America, at Myunging and Taegu Universities in Korea, and at the American Institute of Musical Studies at Graz, Austria. She has appeared as a master teacher, clinician, and lecturer at schools and universities in twenty-seven of the United States, before The Voice Foundation, the national conventions of MTNA and NATS, the International Congress of Voice Teachers and the Vocal Arts Congress, the College Music Society, the National Society for Arts and Letters and for the NATS master/intern teacher program. She is the author of Tristanissimo, the biography of Lauritz Melchior, co-author of The Art of the Song Recital and Power Performance for Singers. Books in progress include a choral book, a series of performance psychology manuals, and a lexicon of the literary allusions in the great song literature, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2005. Her New York private studio has produced such singers as Harolyn Blackwell and Hei-Kyung Hong of the Metropolitan Opera.
