Emerita – Music

She was born Rosalie Lowe in Texas and grew up there. After graduating from high school in Dallas, she went to Northwestern University, where she got a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in voice performance.

Mrs. Loeding was dedicated to educating voice teachers, singers and other professional voice users and teaching them how to help themselves. She also worked with knowledgeable medical specialists.

Singer, actor and music director Ginger Stephens Terlep said Mrs. Loeding was more than a voice teacher. “I always say I got my master’s in music from Rosalie,” Terlep continued. “She taught me so much, not only about voice and singing, but about presenting yourself onstage and offstage, promoting yourself, explaining and teaching.

“She helped me become a better teacher. Her knowledge of many styles of vocal music, from opera to pop, was vast.”

Loeding became a specialist in vocal problems, working with clients ranging from professional singers, broadcasters and others who depend on their voices to produce what she called on her website the “Sound that Sells.”

She worked with a doctor to start the first clinical performing voice rehabilitation program for professional voice users with asthma, bronchitis and allergies at what is now Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. “She had asthma herself, and she started noticing that a lot of her singers had (vocal cord) nodules,” said her daughter Anne Loeding-Foster. “She was trying to find a way to deal with that and started to work with medical professionals.”

Mrs. Loeding also developed one of the first seminars on the jaw pain disorder known as TMJ for voice users, presenting it at Northwestern University.

She was a professor emeritus at (Illinois Benedictine College) Benedictine University and was formerly a member of the internal medicine faculty of Rush Medical College, family member said.

At Illinois Benedictine College (IBC) in Lisle, where she is also associate professor of voice and director of applied music, she counsels clients from every speaking profession imaginable and singers of every persuasion, from rock to opera.

Mrs. Loeding, who continued to teach into her 80s, also was working on a book to be called “Vocal Survival Techniques,” summarizing what she had learned about voice problems and the solutions she had helped clients to work out.

Mrs. Loeding, 86, died of natural causes Thursday, May 7, 2015.