Mutsumi Moteki

  • Professor of Vocal Coaching
  • Berton Coffin Faculty Fellow
  • VOICE + OPERA + MUSICAL THEATRE

Since her undergraduate years at Kunitachi College of Music in Tokyo, Japan, Mutsumi Moteki has been active as a vocal coach and collaborative pianist.  She received extensive training in this area at Westminster Choir College (under Glenn Parker and Dalton Baldwin) and at the University of Michigan (under Martin Katz) as well as at prestigious summer programs such as Music Academy of the West, Steans Institute for Young Artists and the Franz-Schubert-Institut in Baden bei Wien. She is currently a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she teaches singing diction, vocal repertoire and French song literature and is a coach for Eklund Opera Program. She has performed regularly with singers such as Patti Peterson, Keri Rusthoi, Patrick Mason, Irene Friedlob and JungWoo Kim, and has appeared in recitals in the United States, Austria, Switzerland, Japan, Mexico, Macedonia, Sweden and Germany.

Known for her effective and unique vocal coaching style, which advocates beautiful legato singing as well as the fine details of diction and the interpretation of text and music, Moteki has taught master classes for singers and pianists at many universities and colleges in the U.S., Taiwan and Japan. Her other guest teaching positions include a five-week residency at Hochschule für Musik “Hanns Eisler” in Berlin, Germany, a one-year appointment as a guest professor at Kobe College in Japan, and nine summers teaching at the University of Miami’s Salzburg Summer Program. In 2011, she presented a lecture titled “Becoming a Vocal Coach” at the International Collaborative Piano Literature Symposium at the Tainan National University of Arts in Taiwan. She co-translated Martin Katz’s book The Complete Collaborator: the pianist as partner into Japanese, and the Japanese edition was published in the spring of 2012 by Ongaku-no-tomo. 

A passionate promoter of art songs from Japan as well as from other East-Asian countries, she presents these songs in lecture-recitals and workshops.  With Dr. Kumiko Shimizu of Delta State University, she co-created the Japanese Art Song Anthology, volumes 1 and 2, which were published by Classical Vocal Reprints in 2014 and 2016, respectively.

Voice performance