For her auditions to college music programs, with a view to possibly majoring in voice performance, Kat Leverenz prepared the classic Italian solos “Caro mio ben” and “Amarilli, mia bella,” and the gospel standard, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Leverenz ’20 A&A had studied piano since the age of 4, but other than singing in her high school choir, she’d had no formal vocal training.

“Maybe I asked my choir director for some advice, but mostly I just went on the internet and found some practice tracks,” she says. “Honestly, I wasn’t expecting much—I didn’t know what I was doing. And I don’t know how this happened, but I auditioned for seven schools and I got into all of them.”

At Penn State, Leverenz signed up for a B.A. in music, which included classical voice training with Richard Kennedy, now a professor emeritus. That grounding—the lessons she learned in breath control, posture, technical precision, and musical interpretation—would prove invaluable, she says, even as somewhere along the way, the classics became somewhat overbearing. “I actually took a break to figure out if I even wanted to do music, because I was feeling kind of lost in that classical environment,” Leverenz says.

But over the course of a 50-day hike through the deserts of Utah after her junior year, she decided music was indeed her calling—if she could do it her way: sing the genres she loved, and that suited her voice, like jazz, rock, and bluegrass. When she returned to University Park in 2019, Leverenz signed up for lessons with Zach Dennis, a talented State College guitarist. The two fell in love, formed a band called Canary, and began performing both covers and their own material at local venues such as Cafe 210 West, Zeno’s, and 3 Dots. In 2022, they decided to move to Nashville to perform and work on an album. Cut the Wires made it to Spotify’s indie and bluegrass playlist within weeks of its March 2024 release.

The duo is always working on new material, but Leverenz really enjoys teaching, too. Most of her students, she says, don’t have professional goals: They just want to sing because they love to, and she loves that she can help them improve their skills.  “The foundational training in classical singing I had at Penn State has helped me so much in my teaching,” she says. “Just seeing how Richard Kennedy taught, what he focused on and the different techniques he used, have laid the groundwork for how I teach.”