Karen
Lombardi Ingle
Alto, Second Soprano
One of Karen’s fondest memories as a child was singing while swinging
on the swing set at her family home in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. “It was
my favorite pastime. My other favorite pastime was listening to music of all
kinds.”
At age 12, Karen joined the 6th grade chorus, which marked the beginning of a 15-year participation in choirs. She sang in choirs continuously through junior high and high school. But it wasn’t until she was in college, at Bloomsburg University, that she truly learned to sing. There at BU, in 1983, Karen started taking voice lessons.
“My first voice teacher helped me to find my head voice. It was amazing. There were higher notes coming out of me. When my voice teacher heard me, he exclaimed, ‘Wow! I’d pay to hear that.’ ” Needless to say, Karen kept on singing and is in her 18th year of voice lessons.
Also while at college, Karen sang with the BU Madrigal Singers for one year. That gave her a taste of renaissance music and the experience of singing in a smaller group. She was hooked. “After that experience, I no longer wanted to sing in big choirs.”
Several years after college, in the late summer of 1991, Karen went to her first renaissance faire in Pennsylvania. As she watched the various performers, she kept having the feeling that she should be on the stage rather than in the audience. A couple of months later, Karen got a call from an old college friend, Dwayne Heisler (The Bloom Consort’s director), asking if she would be interested in joining the group. “It’s fate, I thought. So I joined.”
Karen lives with her husband Mark and takes care of their two children: Rachel, age 4, and David, age 16 months.
