Beth Parker

Advisory Board

Vocal Coach / Roosevelt University

Beth Parker is a faculty vocal coach at the CCPA Conservatory at Roosevelt University in Chicago and the American Institute of Musical Studies. She has worked in opera as a vocal coach and pianist, chorus master, university lecturer in music history and theory, opera workshop director, producer, and in PR/outreach for nearly forty years. After graduate study at Indiana University, where she spent six years accompanying and coaching students of Virginia Zeani, she apprenticed at the Merola Program of San Francisco Opera and studied with Joan Dornemann and Nico Castel at the Metropolitan Opera. While in New York she ran the YAP program called OMTI for Jerome Hines, where she accompanied lessons for Franco Corelli, Henry Lewis, and Dodi Protero; weekly classes with Frank Corsaro at the Actor’s Studio; and many master classes. For more than a decade Beth was on the faculty at UMass Amherst, where she taught music history and theory, in addition to directing the opera workshop and serving as studio pianist and collaborator on hundreds of recitals and juries. While at UMass she also was assistant organist and choirmaster at an Episcopal church and played continuo harpsichord for early music organizations. She worked across the USA and in Canada for regional opera companies and in Rome before moving to Chicago in 2009. Beth’s coaching specialties are Italian recitative, fearless French vowels, and bel canto style and ornamentation. Unable to withstand the siren song of musicology, Beth has assisted Philip Gossett at the Center for Italian Opera Studies at the University of Chicago since 2011. Her translations of scholarly papers about opera have appeared in Opera Quarterly and the “Vox Imago” series in collaboration with the Teatro alla Scala. She also translates for the prestigious critical editions of Rossini and Saint-Saëns, published by Bärenreiter, and is a freelance editor for musicological works.