Dr. Valerie Trollinger, professor of music, will present the Chambliss Faculty Award lecture at 4:30 p.m., Thursday, March 31, McFarland Student Union Alumni Auditorium. Trollinger’s lecture is titled, “Diagnosing and correcting voice problems in professors: Your voice does not need to end your career.”
Most voice professionals, including professors, experience voice issues during their careers. This presentation will focus on alleviating fear when problems arise, helping professors analyze when to seek professional help and how problems are diagnosed and remediated. Strategies to develop and maintain a healthy voice will be shared.
Trollinger, a 2021 Chambliss Faculty Research Award recipient, has been at KU since 2006. Her Doctor in Music Education and Master of Music Performance (studies in bassoon and voice) were both earned at Indiana University-Jacobs School of Music, Bloomington, Indiana. She holds the chair of Principal Bassoon in the Reading Symphony Orchestra and regularly plays with other regional orchestras. Previously, she regularly performed with the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Over the past decade, she has developed research in a new field of study that deals with diagnosing, treating and rehabilitating musicians, especially wind instrumentalists (teachers and students) who suffer from vocal and performance issues. While the field of professional vocal/voice care in singers and professional voice users has been around for a while, this area of wind instrumentalist voice care is extremely new. This research interest and her additional training as a singer and in voice pedagogy led her to work in the Performing Arts Medicine field which is highly unusual for a professor of music education.
Trollinger has assisted in the development of a new medical micro-specialty within otolaryngology (the branch of medicine dealing with issues and injuries of the ear and throat) and has been a part of the only medical practice in the world that is developing diagnostic and treatment methods related to this specialty. She also works with voice patients who are also wind instrumentalists who suffer from voice injuries and traumatic playing. Over the last seven years, Trollinger has become a master of this emerging specialty so much so that it has given her some extraordinary opportunities. Her research and knowledge in this specific field have landed her a position at Drexel University College of Medicine as an adjunct professor of Clinical Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, where she educates medical students and specialists on working with musicians/wind instrumentalists to care for their voices.
Not only is Trollinger an active performing musician, a professor of Music at KU, a professor of Surgery at Drexel and an incredible researcher, she also works Wednesdays at Philadelphia ENT Associates assessing patients, where she works alongside Dr. Robert Sataloff and other physicians and voice therapists in the practice researching and working with vocal problems in wind instrumentalists. Her collaboration with the prolific Sataloff has led the two of them in researching hearing loss in our own Kutztown University music majors, which is an ongoing venture.
Trollinger has made significant contributions to publications in various related fields. She has published articles and studies in The Double Reed Journal, The Journal of Singing, The Journal of Research in Music Education, General Music Today, The Music Educator’s Journal, and The Philosophy of Music Education Review. In addition, she has authored books on music education with her husband, Dr. John Flohr, and co-authored several chapters in “Professional Voice: The Science and Art of Clinical Care, 4th Ed” with Sataloff, and has provided several more book chapters to other books published by Plural Publishing and Springer Nature. She has traveled all over the world to places like Denmark, Germany, Greece and Malaysia to present her research and papers on various topics including various topics on performing arts medicine as they apply to teachers, students and performers. In 2016, Dr. Trollinger was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to teach and work for a semester at the Universiti Teknologi MARA in Selangor, Malaysia.
Trollinger is also the daughter of retired Kutztown University music department chair and professor of voice, Dr. Laree Trollinger.
The Chambliss award, inaugurated in 2004 through a gift from Dr. Carlson R. Chambliss, professor emeriti of physical science, is meant to recognize the very highest achievement in research and scholarship and can be awarded only once within a person’s career.
