Phyllis Pancella
Mezzo soprano
Teaching Philosophy
I draw from three wells when I teach: my own experience being in the profession; how I myself was taught combined with my ongoing study of vocal pedagogy; and my study of educational psychology. My own artistic inclinations and growth during 40 plus years onstage have come to inform how I braid these three strands together in my teaching, and they are rarely addressed separately for very long. In my mind, there’s no such thing as storytelling without technique, competence without artistry, physiology without self-awareness. I think in terms of how to express through healthy, grounded physicality involving the entire body, and how to do it with the conviction of one’s own artistic point of view, while figuring out how to contribute to an open, compassionate, and curious community of artistic learners and consumers. This means that when we do “vocalises” intended to work on all the technical goals of balanced breath pressure, neutral larynx, low breath support, etc., I encourage students to portray emotions and intentions with facial expression, gesture, and posture. It means that we dig into repertoire to discover the ways that it supports pedagogical truths, but also how it connects to the student on the level of language or story, and how that in turn serves the audience. Learning how to balance confidence with humility and how to take the edge off discipline with humor is a bonus of the process.
The task is a little compressed in a summer program, in that I am doing a quick assessment of where a student is in their development and goal-setting, and then finding ideas to stimulate continued growth long after we’ve parted. Together we gather a kind of mental bar graph of all the things involved in singing, knowing that we each have some areas in which we are more advanced than average and some areas in which we are less advanced than average. My job is to help each student identify which is which, and then get the lower percentiles to catch up with the upper percentiles—-which may mean that you don’t get to work so much on acting this week until you do some more breath exercises and solidify your rhythms. It may mean we have to ditch repertoire work until we gather some solid tools to deal with performance anxiety. This can feel a little bit like eating your vegetables before you get to eat dessert, and I am transparent in saying that there will be times when it feels like everything is difficult and progress is a slog. But oh, the payoff when you’re firing on all cylinders!
Mezzo-soprano Phyllis Pancella has performed roles from Carmen and Adalgisa to Lizzie Borden and Nero with major companies in places like Houston, Chicago, San Francisco, London, Paris, Tel Aviv, and Naples, Italy. She has performed concert repertoire under the batons of Leonard Slatkin, Jane Glover, Daniel Barenboim, James Conlon, and Anne Manson, among many others. A big fan of chamber music and art song, Pancella has also appeared with Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Chamber Music Northwest, OK Mozart, BargeMusic, and the Prague New Music Festival. Always ready to try new things, she continues to be part of premieres, which have included the Alice Tully Hall presentation of Dominick Argento’s “Miss Manners on Music,” the west coast premiere of Kamala Sankaram’s “Thumbprint,” and which will bring her to Montana for the world premiere of Zack Redler’s new opera, A River Runs Through It in September of 2026. She has recorded on the Naxos, Erato, and Neos labels.
Her teaching experiences, including master classes and private voice instruction at Florida State University, Indiana University, Boston Conservatory of Music, University of Missouri (at Columbia, Kansas City and St. Louis), University of Kentucky, University of Kansas, Skidmore College and Northwestern University, piqued her interest in how learning and cognition operate in the one-to-one instructional setting. In 2019 she went back to school for a master’s degree in Educational Psychology which she completed two years later. She joined the Voice faculty of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in 2020, and has also been teaching with the Janiec Opera Company of the Brevard Music Festival since 2023.
