Danielle is a Kansas native residing in Oklahoma City with her husband David and furry sons Albere and Theo. As an artist-scholar, she actively performs, teaches, and researches.

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PERFORMER

Danielle is a lyric coloratura soprano with experience interpreting a range of roles. Her favorite performed roles include Handel’s Rodelinda, Josephine (H.M.S. Pinafore), Belinda (Dido and Aeneas), Serpina (La serva padrona), La Musique (Les plaisirs de Versailles), Donna Anna (Don Giovanni), Adele (Die Fledermaus), and Contessa di Folleville (Il viaggio a Reims). She is also an avid concert soloist, from Bach and Vivaldi to Beethoven and Verdi. Moreover, as the Academic Coordinator of the Brisch Center for Historical Performance, Danielle specializes in historically informed performance and style embodiment.

 

Danielle is an eager advocate of new music and new works. Her recent recital programming highlights creative women and persons of color historically marginalized in the classical idiom. In 2023, she commissioned two new art songs for her solo recital Contemporary Song Cycles and Commissions by Chris Prather and Hannah Helbig. In 2021-22, she produced a new Oklahoma opera, No Justice, No Peace, by Prather. She is particularly proud of that timely and poignant project as it represents the powerful impact opera has in the present.

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Danielle is deeply dedicated to musical outreach and public education, specifically exposing the community to opera and classical vocal music. In 2016, she founded the Oklahoma City chapter of Opera on Tap, a

501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that provides performing opportunities for local professional singers in the metropolitan area. This has now become a successful local entity called OK City Opera, of which she is the Artistic Director. She regularly programs, performs, and emcees monthly events. 

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TEACHER/PEDAGOGUE

Danielle has taught musicians for thirteen years, with nine years teaching at the higher ed level. Danielle is the Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Central Oklahoma School of Music, where she teaches music history courses, applied vocal lessons, lyric diction, opera history, and research/writing courses. She started her career in higher education as an adjunct professor at Oklahoma City Community College and has also worked on staff at the University of Oklahoma teaching non-majors Understanding Music.

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As a voice pedagogue, Danielle has had the privilege of teaching hundreds of students over the past decade. She currently teaches her private studio from her home in southwest Edmond.

 

Teaching through a holistic approach, she works with singers and pianists to develop healthy technique as well as cultivating communication skills so they can clearly express ideas. In addition, she has crafted detailed processes to help students learn music and language efficiently. Danielle is committed to her students, helping them gain the tools to be empowered musicians. In addition to 20+ years of vocal training, Danielle is a trained pianist, having played for 29 years. 

 

She is a member of the College Music Society, National Association of Teachers of Singing, American Musicological Society, and the Rousseau Association.

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RESEARCHER

Danielle's scholarship approaches music as embodied and lived experience, with specific investigations in eighteenth- and twenty-first century opera, culture, philosophy, and commissions. As a musicologist, she specializes in opera studies, drawn to opera’s collaborative nature that merges multiple artistic disciplines into one art form: music, aesthetics, dramaturgy, versification, acting, costumery, dance, stagecraft. Thus, her various research efforts shed light on opera’s multi-modal dimensions.

 

Though disparate centuries, her primary research focuses on both eighteenth-century French comédie, culture, and philosophy, as well as twentieth- and twenty-first century American opera. Her dissertation centers on the latter, considering the pioneering operatic institutions who have helped shape new American opera. Through extensive interviews with industry leaders, Danielle is illuminating trends in commissioning, composition, production, and consumption in the early twenty-first century. Her published dissertation is currently embargoed as she develops it into a monograph. Her secondary research interests are characterized by the question of style. She is intrigued by the assimilation of various idioms in composition, looking at how this materializes in the work of J.S. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Grétry, Heggie, Meyerbeer, Mozart, Rameau, Rossini, Wolf, and Verdi.

 

As a performative musicologist, Danielle has presented on these topics internationally and nationally with the National Opera Association, American Musicological Society (Southwest), Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini, College Music Society, National Association of Teachers of Singing, and the Rousseau Association. Recent publications include a book review for Cambridge Core’s Nineteenth-Century Music Review, “Two Schemata for Embodied Cognition in Student Singers,” “Musical Moral Sense in Rousseau’s Essai,” “Cultivating Connections in Twenty-First Century American Opera,” and “Sensibilité, Self-Sacrifice, and the Sentimental.”
 

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EDUCATION

Danielle received her Doctorate of Musical Arts from the University of Oklahoma in 2021. Additionally, Danielle has two Masters of Music, one in Opera Performance (2014) and another in Music History/Literature (2015), both from Wichita State University. Her Bachelor of Music in Vocal Performance is also from Wichita State University (2012).

At OU, she studied with Dr. Leslie Flanagan and coached with Dr. Elizabeth Avery. Her musicological advisor was Dr. Sanna Pederson.

At WSU, she studied with Dr. Deborah Baxter and coached with Samuel Ramey. Her thesis advisor/musicological mentor was Dr. Mary Channen Caldwell.