Amy Pfrimmer

Amy Pfrimmer is a professional singer and Associate Professor of Music at Tulane University, New Orleans, where she has been a Newcomb Department of Music faculty member since 2007. Pfrimmer is Tulane University’s Lillian Gerson Watsky Professor in Voice, voice area coordinator, director of Tulane Opera, and artist faculty of the FIO-Italia summer festival in Urbania, Italy. She is also the founding director of the Tulane Vocal Arts Festival, which she began in 2018 to promote professional training, research, and performance opportunities, as well as cultural enrichment for Tulane faculty, guest artist faculty, student singers, and community singers of all ages from across the region. The festival has included concerts, master classes, movement based singing workshops, research presentations, and panel discussions, such as 2023’s The Race for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Lyric Theatre.

Pfrimmer is committed to the education of young artists and brings a breadth and depth of experience gained from cross cultural collaboration and the international exchange of music and ideas. Her artistic projects have included opera, oratorio, recital, concert, music directing, and stage directing with her musical collaborations taking her across the US, Europe, and Canada. She has appeared in concert and operatic repertoire ranging from Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire to the sacred works of Dave Brubeck to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, La bohème and La traviata and Dead Man Walking to Charlie Parker’s Yardbird and The Merry Widow. In New Orleans, she is as a principal cantor at St. Louis Cathedral-Basilica where she is also liaison to the Paris Conservatoire’s Jeunes artistes organists. She in an advisory board member, serving on the production and education committees, of the New Orleans Opera Association, a company with which she has enjoyed a 30+ year relationship.

Pfrimmer is a 2019 American Prize Chicago Oratorio Award winner, a past recipient of Tulane University's Crest Award for Outstanding Faculty, winner of a Louisiana Division of the Arts Fellowship, a Metropolitan Opera Education Fund grant, a NATS Foundation’s Emerging Leaders Award, and Florida Grand Opera’s Gilbert Artist of the Year. She has presented her research findings and performances for the National Opera Association (NOA), International Congress of Voice Teachers (ICVT), International Music by Women Conference (IAWM), and University of Glasgow’s Spheres of Singing conference, among others. Recent international and national concerts and presentations have included the music of César Franck, Louise Reichardt, Louis Vierne, the sacred Music of Dave Brubeck, Islamic Opera, French Opera in the Belle Époque, and a comparison of Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben to Maxim Samarov’s Falling: A Monodrama. She has also presented and drawn attention to issues of racism and sexism in the operatic canon and in lyric theatre. Pfrimmer’s recordings include song literature of Louise Reichardt and César Franck (MSR Classics), and Louis Vierne (Centaur).