Falling in Love with Music
Natalie began singing around the same time she learned to walk and talk! She had a small Fisher-Price casette tape recorder with a tiny microphone which she used to capture numerous songs (it was the 80s and 90s!). Her youth was filled with piano lessons, voice lessons, choirs, musicals, and her own vocal projects, so she decided to pursue music professionally and to share her passion and expertise with others.
Natalie's Journey with Music
Despite her wide musical experiences in grade school, including leading roles in the Pirates of Penzance, My Fair Lady, and the Music Man, having been an excellent student academically Natalie was initially encouraged by her parents to go into the sciences. With a love of sea creatures and the ocean, she chose marine biology as her intended major in college. However, the college of sciences and the college of arts were right next to each other and Natalie could not help but notice students practicing music in their dorm rooms and traveling back and forth with their instruments each day. Before the first semester was over, she had auditioned and been accepted into Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University under the instruction of distinguished voice pedagogue Judith Nicosia. Natalie had many opportunities on the east coast participating as a chorister and soloist performing in famous classical venues in New York City and with local opera companies and ensembles while living in New Jersey for six years. She took courses in vocal pedagogy and had the opportunity to begin teaching voice and piano lessons at the age of twenty and has never stopped teaching since then!
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Challenging personal and financial circumstances hit before graduate school and Natalie had to reconsider which path she might follow. Her love of music and newly discovered passion for teaching music was once again something she could not imagine leaving behind so she chose to attend Eastern Michigan Universty. There, she was able to design her own three year program during which she earned her masters degree in performance and a post-baccalaureate K-12 music teaching certification - all while working a graduate assistantship, singing professionally in Metro Detroit, and teaching private lessons several days a week! Natalie taught at three different music schools in Ann Arbor, Plymouth, and Farmington Hills, and eventually moved to accepting students independently.
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Natalie moved to Chicago in 2013 and began teaching elementary school music at Westbook School for Young Learners in Mount Prospect. She spent three wonderful years working with all of the first graders in District 57 before leaving the school to accomodate the growing number of requests for voice and piano lessons full time. She moved to Mount Prospect, opened her home studio in 2016, and has been teaching there since that time. Natalie has performed professionally with many churches and choral ensembles in the Chicagoland area as a chorister and soloist in addition to singing for events such as weddings, funerals, receptions, games, and galas. In more recent years, she and her husband - who is also a pianist - have enjoyed performing together online through Twitch and traveling around the country to perform their own arrangements of music from video game soundtracks.
