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 the manual she wished she had as a student at Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas. It is not a theory book or a history of bel canto but a working document that tells singers exactly where to put their tongue, how to expand their ribs, why they should stop listening to their own voice through their Eustachian tubes, and what it actually feels like when the vocal tract is doing its job.
Across 19 chapters, Kasper walks through the entire singing system from the diaphragm up. Chapters 1 and 2 deal with inhalation and support, treating breathing as a coordinated athletic event involving the diaphragm, external intercostals, and upper abdominals. Chapter 3 introduces the larynx, tongue, and pharynx as the lower architecture of the vocal tract, and Chapter 4 maps the rest: lips, hard palate, soft palate, cheeks, and jaw. The middle chapters tackle what Kasper calls "the fundamental," the raw sound created at the level of the vocal folds before the vocal tract shapes it into language. She returns to this concept from multiple angles across Chapters 5, 11, 12, and 13, each time adding a layer: vowel projection, resonance tuning, the Alexander Technique for pharyngeal space, and the relationship between the first and second harmonics.
Chapter 6 recounts her own humbling lesson in resonance, when a doctoral teacher told her he did not hear much of it in her voice, and how 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. Chapters 9 and 10 address registration, the passaggio transitions that trip up nearly every developing singer. Kasper favors the glissando as the primary tool for smoothing those breaks and 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. Chapter 15 provides an accessible introduction to the International Phonetic Alphabet for English, and Chapter 17 covers melisma, interpolation, and runs with attention to both Baroque ornamentation and contemporary popular style.
The final chapters are practical and personal. Chapter 18 positions the book within the broader tradition of vocal pedagogy, citing William Vennard, Richard Miller, Joan Wall, Robert Caldwell, and Theodore Dimon while arguing for a return toward empirical, feel-based teaching. Chapter 19 addresses special issues: pitch matching, singing in tune in the upper register, vibrato problems, TMJ, and the concept of "covering" the voice.
Kasper was 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. Her early education included a one-room schoolhouse in eastern Montana and high school in Winton, California, before 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, for two years. She spent the next three decades teaching voice at Bethel College, performing annual recitals, and co-producing theater with Arlo. After 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. She and Arlo have been married for 63 years.
The book reads the way Kasper teaches. Information is repeated from chapter to chapter because, as she writes, "repetition is how we learn." The tone is direct, patient, and free of jargon. Exercises appear at the end of most chapters, many of them drawn from real studio sessions: 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 (Kathryn Kasper or kaspervocalmethod), where many of the exercises are demonstrated on video. Singing: A Technical Guide is written for voice teachers, professional and amateur singers, pop soloists, and choir members. It covers classical, Broadway, and popular technique within a single unified system. Kasper does not pretend the system is simple. She does insist it is learnable.
