Sheila Barnes is an international singing teacher. Based between Suffolk, UK and Le Marche, Italy, Sheila teaches singing at the University of Cambridge (Trinity College) and online to her regular London and European professional students.

Sheila Barnes has a unique way of teaching based on her wide-ranging experience as professional soprano, lecturer, and researcher.

Her formal education in music began at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, where she obtained a Bachelor of Music degree with highest honours. A nationally competitive scholarship gave her access to graduate studies at the Yale School of Music, where in two years she was granted the MM and in three years the MMA in Voice Performance.

The launch of her professional career took place in Canada at the Guelph Spring Festival, where she sang a staged production of Acis and Galatea, to critical acclaim. Her early success on the opera stage took her to the Spoleto Festival in Italy for chamber opera, Britten’s the Rape of Lucretia (Lucia), and following her successful run of performances at the Teatro Caio Melisso, she was tapped to enter the Juilliard American Opera Center for young professionals.

After this intensive opera-training year she followed her Yale colleague C. William Harwood, conductor, back to Texas, to lead the casts of the touring opera of the Houston Grand Opera, and eventually for a Jean Pierre Ponnelle production of La Traviata. In the meantime, Sheila made her New York City Opera debut as Musetta, following performances of that role in important American regional companies of Kentucky and St. Louis. She appeared frequently in Canada after her triumphant debut there, as soprano soloist in oratorio, with the Toronto Symphony, the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir and the National Arts Centre Orchestra of Ottawa. She was soprano soloist in New York City with the famed St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble and the Composer’s Showcase at Lincoln Center.

Then the 27-year-old soprano’s career trajectory hit a snag. Having started her career blessed with a good vocal technique from her first teacher in Texas, then thinking she needed “international advice”, she put herself into the hands of a well-known singing teacher who taught differently and questionably, and Sheila began to have problems with her voice. These problems came to a head when she woke up with no voice one day during rehearsals for Cosi’ Fan Tutte in Houston. The late Van Lawrence diagnosed anterior swellings on her vocal folds, and she was catapulted into the fabled “vocal crisis”, years earlier than most.

This misfortune Sheila has transformed into the good fortune of teaching singing in the way that she does.
But it was a long road. Having never earned money at any job but singing, she was so distraut about the loss of her voice that she could not sing for two years following the crisis, due to the psychological trauma. During that time she sought out Oren Brown, a famous teacher and voice therapist whom she had befriended in Spoleto, and who taught singing at the Juilliard School. Together with Oren, she “self-diagnosed” the problem and went about trying to learn what had gone wrong and why. She consulted the late Wilbur Gould, founder of the Lenox Hill Hospital Vocal Dynamics Laboratory, who pioneered the technology commonplace today of viewing the vocal folds on a video screen. With a fibre-optic camera carefully placed on a wire through the nose and poised above her vocal folds, Sheila sang Musetta’s aria and Dr. Gould looked on. By that time her vocal folds were again in perfect condition but they found that she was doing something in her speech to cause one vocal fold to be pulled across the other. Dr. Gould was surprised when a week later Sheila asked to see him again for another look, and she revealed that she had used “bio-feedback” to correct that problem. By viewing the muscles in their erroneous action, Sheila had been able to use “proprioception” to change a pattern.

With the vocal fold function issue resolved, Sheila still felt she had to know more about the workings of the voice, in order to be certain that she could never again be put onto the wrong path, and also so that she could help others to avoid damaging their voices by following wrong vocal instruction. She worked with a physicist at a vocal lab outside the City, who produced a recording, by placing electrical pads on her neck which transmitted into a machine, of the primary “buzz” produced by the vocal folds. This was very helpful in developing a concrete set of ideas of how the voice works.

Many books on singing and anatomy were very helpful, as were numerous skilful singing teachers in New York City. In addition to Oren Brown, Daniel Ferro, Ute Graf, Margot Werner-Mueller, Adele Addison, Charles Bressler, Robert , Joan Caplan, Shirley Meier, and finally, Marcy Lindheimer and Dr. Carl Stough, founder of the famous “Breathing Coordination” method.

Later, in London, Sheila received a great deal of information and help from the late David Mason, from Janice Chapman and from coach David Harper, also in Italy from Oberdan Traica, tenor of the Vatican Choir and the Rome Opera.

Convinced that the teaching of singing was very different in skill from the art of singing, Sheila enrolled at the University of East Anglia one- year Counselling Skills course. She studied neurolinguistic programming with its founder Richard Bandler in order to obtain further skills in communication and educational theory.