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Audrey Babcock
Audrey Babcock is an Assistant Professor of Voice in the Department of Music. She is an award-winning mezzo-soprano who has gained notoriety for her commanding, powerful performances as Carmen, her dark, hypnotic portrayals of Maddalena in Rigoletto, and her emotionally raw performances as Aldonza in The Man of La Mancha. As Carmen, Babcock made her French debut with the Festival Lyrique-en-Mer and has performed the role with companies such as Florentine Opera, Nashville Opera, Florida Grand Opera, New York City Opera, San Antonio Opera, Knoxville Opera, Opera Delaware, Toledo Opera, Anchorage Opera, Dayton Opera, Fort Worth Opera, Mill City Summer Opera, and Utah Festival Opera and most recently with Bar Harbor Music Festival where she completed her 115th performance of the fiercest of the Femme Fatales.Babcock discerns her research focuses along two tracts; the physical mechanisms of the breathing apparatus as pertains to the act of singing and specific arenas of musical history. To the singing mechanism, Ms. Babcock’s research pertains to the pelvic floor, pelvic health, and its tangible use in partnership with the deconstruction of breath. She is unpacking the relationship of the pelvic diaphragm to the global singing instrument from laryngeal stabilization to simultaneous neurological calm and full-bodied sonic vitality.
Embodying these tools, Babcock’s Masterclass series, The Full-Bodied Voice, has brought her to colleges and Young Artist programs across the US and abroad from Fort Worth Opera to California Institute of the Arts. The series, from inspiration to creation, directly addresses how life and society has retrained the perfect breath we were born to take. From the ancient traditions of Kundalini Yoga and other kinesthetic practices she takes these tools from practice to performance.
Babcock’s other arena of research involves bringing historical music and language into a modern context investigating Sephardic music, the Ladino language, and music created prior to and through the diaspora (post expulsion from Spain). The cross-pollination of Arabic (Moorish), Catholic, and Jewish art and culture in Spain circa 1400 A.D., as well as the following aurally transmitted diasporic song tradition, are her specific focuses. Having spent much time under the tutelage of the late Nico Castel (who wrote the first book of ladino songs widely available to the public), her first album, Songs for Carmen, was born. SFC, a concept album, recorded under her Hebrew name, Aviva, hinges on the legend that the original Carmen may have been a Sephardic Jew and not a Gypsy. Babcock’s concert series, Beyond Carmen, her work with the ensemble Flamenco Sephardit and her Choreopoem – Carmen; Shadow of my Shadow, are all beneficiaries and extensions of this life-long pursuit.
