Colleges and Conferences

A longtime favorite of the American Association of Teachers of French, Claudia's cabaret concerts and seminars have traveled to college campuses across the country. The offerings are customized to match the academic interests of the department sponsoring Claudia's program.

Concerts:

If your college is presenting Claudia on a theatre or performing arts stage, view the offerings listed here. A club-like environment can take advantage of more improvised programming with open sets of music around a piano or with a jazz combo.

Seminars for the college campus

Murray StateStudents and professor at Murray State University, Kentucky

A graduate of social history, Claudia participates in inter-disciplinary seminars (social and cultural history, literature, sociology, theatre, music, visual arts, French studies) and can suggest the following themes to correlate with her performances.

  • Paris Noir
    A unique presentation of Yusef Komunyakaa's jazz-inflected poetry and Claudia's songs from Paris in the Jazz Age. Together they explore the history of the negritude movement and African-Americans finding their voice in the City of Light. Pulitzer-Prize winning poet and professor of creative writing at New York University, Komunyakaa is "required reading" for aspring young writers.
  • Transcending the Language Barrier; Songs that translate, songs that don't
    How can songs be translated for performance while maintaining as much rhythm, rhyme, cultural context, and meaning woven in the original? Developed with Professor Debbie Mann of Southern Illinois University - Edwardsville, this workshop features sung examples and can include the exercise of creating a singable translation of a French song (or other language as appropriate to the course) into English. (First presented to the Illinois Conference of Teachers of Foreign Languages.)
  • Arts and politics in France, 1900-1950,
    Including post-World War II "Left Bank period" of existentialism, feminism, and "Americans in Paris"; the cultural shifts responding to the world wars, the Russian Revolution, the rise of women's rights, working-class upsurges, fascism, repression, colonial liberation, technological changes.

Master Classes

Master classes are great opportunities for theatre and music students to strengthen their interpretative abilities in song. Claudia uses a theatrical approach to explore character, language, place and discovery with students as they sing arias, art songs, Broadway tunes, jazz standards and more. Guidelines for a Master Class will help get the process started.

Teachers' conferences

Claudia is available as presenter, speaker, clinician or panelist in the areas of her expertise and has presented at state, regional and national conferences of music educators, American Association of French Teachers (AATF), and foreign language teachers.