“I am a musician, completely and totally, every part of me,” says Kara McCabe, opera singer and instrumentalist. “My mom tells me I started to sing before I started to talk.”
McCabe is a graduate of the prestigious Manhattan School of Music, where she studied while simultanecously attending high school in Park Ridge, N.J. At 17, she attended the premier Tanglewood Institute in Lenox, Mass. – having already performed, at 15, at Carnegie Hall as a violinist with the Bergen Young Artists Orchestra.
Now, at 19, McCabe is blending the best of all possible worlds. The daughter of Karen Fasoli McCabe '74 and Tim McCabe '73 and sister of Andrew '03 and Gillian '05, she is pursuing her love of British literature and other courses while taking private vocal lessons.
“I've got four generations of people who left a mark on this College,” McCabe says, noting that a great, great grandfather, a grandfather and a great uncle also went to Union. “My father and my sister won the Bailey Prize. My brother won the Daggett Prize. My mom was a trailblazer; she was in the College's first female class.”
A dual music and English major, McCabe is already exerting her own mark on the school. She sings in the College choir and Garnet Minstrels, writes for Concordiensis and is active in Sorum House Council and several other campus groups.
“I love Union. And it's finally my turn to come here. I'm not going to be at my vocal peak until I'm 30, and instead of throwing myself to the wolves at 18, I know that at Union I'm going to get an amazing, well-rounded, liberal arts experience. I'll go to conservatory as a grad student. To be onstage at the Metropolitan Opera is my be-all and end-all.”
For now, Union gives McCabe the perfect place to mature, take risks and broaden her horizons. She'll sing to that.