About Us
About Christina Rovics
Christina Rovics credits the British bass Raymond Buckingham as the one teacher out of many who helped her to build her vocal technique. He also inspired her passion for teaching.
Formerly on the faculties of Western Connecticut State University and the Connecticut Conservatory of Music and Dance, she teaches singing to people of all ages in her own home/studio in Bethel Connecticut in partnership with her pianist husband. Her vocal career as a performing artist spans decades, from Trooper Light Opera in Stamford in the 1960s to numerous recital appearances in and around the New York area. She sang the works of William Flanagan at Tanglewood at the invitation of Gunther Schuller in 1982. appeared as soloist with the Danbury Concert Chorus and Danbury Symphony Orchestra in Mozart’s Coronation Mass in 1991), and premiered works of several composers in addition to mastering hundreds of works in numerous languages drawn from the established art song literature. Two commercially released CDs on the North South Recordings label feature her artistry -- Howard Rovics Retrospective (1998) and A Song Recital (1999) containing one of the few complete recordings of the Emily Dickinson Songs of Aaron Copland. She premiered Rovics’ Song on Chinese Poetry on the North/South Consonance concert series in New York City on its New Years Celebration! concert January 4, 1998 with Max Lifchitz conducting the ensemble.
About Howard Rovics
Howard Rovics is a Professor Emeritus of music having retired from 33 years of full-time college teaching at the School of the Arts on the C.W.Post Campus of Long Island University in 2000. He devotes his time to composing concert music, freelancing as an organist, and codirecting the Christina Rovics Vocal Studio. He holds a Masters Degree from the Manhattan School of Music followed by studies in composition with the late Stefan Wolpe and further postgraduate work at the NYU Film School and the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.
He wrote 30 film scores to children’s books during a five year period of commercial composing early in his career. His score to Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are won a major award from the Columbus Film Festival for the outstanding score of the year in 1969.
Working Together
Together Christina and Howard Rovics have been concertizing and teaching since the mid 1980's. From 1986 until 2004 The Christina Rovics Vocal Studio was located in Danbury where several commercially released recordings were produced. Then in June of 2004 they moved to Bethel Connecticut.
Howard Rovics: Retrospective was released in 1998 on the North/South Recordings label. It features Christina as a soloist singing sixteen of Howard's songs, many with him at the piano.
A Song Recital was released in 1999 on the North/South Recordings label. Christina Rovics is the soprano soloist accompanied by Howard Rovics. The CD features Songs of Emily Dickinson by Aaron Copland. It also includes works by Manuel de Falla, Gabriel Faure and Richard Strauss.
In Recital Vol 1 was released in 2008 and In Recital Vol 2 came out in 2009. Both present soprano Christina Rovics with pianist Howard Rovics in studio recordings of the repertoire that they had been presenting in numerous recitals in the 1980s and 1990s. Portions of everything can be heard on CDBaby, purchased one song at a time or downloaded as complete albums.
THE STUDIO
The Christina Rovics Vocal Studio began in the late 1980s in Danbury as soon as the 
Rovics duo began to take on an occasional private student but over the years it evolved synergistically. They worked in close partnership to serve the needs of a diverse clientele: high schoolers auditioning for leads in big productions, community theater people honing their vocal skills, choral singers improving their reading skills, and professionals needing help in learning new roles or preparing for highly competitive auditions. A few of the people who came to the Rovics studio became, over the years quite established career performers i.e. film star Jessica Biel learned Annie as a ten-year-old, Michelle Aravena who performed all of the female leads in the Broadway revival of A Chorus Line, Donna Moore who did her one woman show, first in Connecticut and then Off Broadway in a New York run. In all this time Christina and Howard offered classical training to those students open to exploring the literature, and prepared them for conservatory training in opera and art song.
TECHNOLOGY
It was in the late 1980s that Howard, a full time college teacher and composer needed Christina’s help to master the new medium of desktop music publishing. Composers needed to learn to use software to make the transition from hand written pen and ink manuscript to drafting scores in sophisticated music manuscript programs at a time when personal computers were barely up to the task. Christina added this to her skills, becoming adept at one of the first such programs Personal Composer ( which predated Windows ) and later Finale. Drafting computerized scores lead to sound editing. For a time she was much sought after by composers for her skill at this too. Sound editing and studio quality digital recording preoccupied the Rovics duo for several years in the late 1990s when they turned their home and teaching studio into a personal recording studio as well. They rehearsed and recorded for hours to produce two commercial CDs released on the North/South Recording label in 1998 and 1999 respectively doing much of the engineering and editing themselves. It was the meeting of these technological challenges that enabled them to weave technological resources into their private teaching practice to this day. Recording all lessons direct to CD, supplementing their grand piano with a synthesizer to facilitate transposing or experiment with alternate accompanying sounds, quickly bringing up Youtube to explore performances, recording video in their studio for study or to make demos, maintaining a large iTunes library, helping students prepare audio demos and helping students place customized online orders of sheet music when determining the correct key is an issue.
PIANO & THEORY
Anyone who aspires to a performing or teaching career in music must have basic keyboard skills. It’s professional requirement that all of the college music programs insist upon. But keyboard skills are one of the most valuable tools just for learning music in general. Many of Christina’s voice students also study piano with Howard, who in recognition of the student’s main focus, the voice, adapts his piano instruction to the special needs of the singer. It’s both a convenience to go to one place for both forms of instruction and an advantage to have two teachers coordinating with one another.
EVENTS
The studio puts on a number of different events throughout the year to showcase students. There is the annual student recital for an invited audience of parents and friends. But there are also public events like Singing for Joy, a carefully balanced program intended for a wider audience with the goal of raising charitable funds. Singing at a nursing home is sometimes a transformative experience for a singer, where the singer is greatly appreciated in a low pressure situation for a recital. In the past the Studio has put on karaoke evenings in a family restaurant environment or even karaoke combined with live synthesizer accompaniments provided by Howard. Another way that the studio generates performance opportunities for select students is to recommend them to other studios such Angel Thorne Music’s Diva night or its summertime Angelfest. A few of its students join singer/guitarist Billy Michael in one of his local restaurant appearances. We are always on the look out for suitable performance opportunities. One of the best of these is to have Rob Volpintesta at Angel-Thorne Music do a professionally mastered recording in his studio. When a student is ready for this experience and hears themselves, literally for the first time, a high quality, professionally made recording can be a personally transformative experience.
Additional Information
Book a Lesson
For more information or to book a voice lesson:
Call 203-744-5841
or you can also reach us by filling out this online form requesting a lesson.