Contralto Martha Jane Howe, a native San Diegan, sang folk songs in her teens in Mission Beach, graduated with a B.Music Performance degree from SDSU, followed by graduate work in opera at Indiana U and USC. She sang in the San Diego Opera chorus and gathered her first of thirteen roles with San Diego Opera, performed with Pacific Lyric Theatre, and enjoyed a series of recitals and baroque concerts before moving to Manhattan where she started an international opera and concert career specializing in twentieth-century repertoire with over a hundred roles, mostly as either the benevolent elder, or the mother/nurse of your nightmares. A listing of her varied roles, concerts, recitals and resulting reviews can be found at marthahowe.com. 

 

Martha started teaching in 1998 while living in Vienna, Austria, and has an international voice studio (on-line and in-studio in North Park) with students who are performing in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Brazil, and across the US. Her first book on the tumultuous beginning and interesting future of The Voice Foundation, "Broadening the Circle", can be found at voicefoundation.org. In 2018 Compton Publishing U.K. is publishing her book, “Owners’ Manual for the Aging Voice”. A member of the NATS SD board, she presented at the Cal-Western Conference in Salt Lake City in January, and will be a presenter at the NATS National Conference in Las Vegas in June 2018.