Vandy Student Danielle Bavli Puts Her Own Spin on Music City

Danielle Bavli is one of just 13 percent of applicants accepted into the roughly 200-student program at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music.

She has a face you may recognize from SEC commercials, but Bavli a vocal performance major at Blair, as the students call it. It’s one of the best opera programs in the nation, and it’s right in the heart of Music City.

Blair, as the students call it, is one of the best opera programs in the nation, and it’s right in the heart of Music City. The school provides undergraduates with conservatory-quality music training, outstanding teachers at an unbelievably low student to faculty ratio of 4-to-1, frequent performance opportunities, and exceptional facilities.

Bavli hails from New York City, where she was a member of the Metropolitan Opera Children’s Chorus. Now in her senior year at Blair, the talented soprano has been in every opera production offered, and she’s received a whole host of awards to prove it. In 2016, she took home the Robin Nell Dickerson Award, given to an outstanding voice major for excellence in performance and scholarship. In 2017, she was one of six vocalists worthy of the Emerging Talent Award in the Lotte Lenya Competition. The competition recognizes talented singer/actors who are dramatically and musically convincing in repertoire ranging from opera/operetta to contemporary Broadway scores. Opera News stated that “no vocal contest better targets today’s total-package talents.”

When it comes to her voice, Bavli takes no chances: “As a voice major, I definitely have to make sacrifices in regard to being a normal college student. When your body is your instrument and your instrument is your major, being consistently fatigued or even catching a cold can put you out of commission for weeks and sabotage your grades, schoolwork, and personal progress.” And while her musical prowess can’t be denied, her psychology minor requires her academic chops to be equally sharp. On the importance of diversifying her studies, Bavli says, “The great thing about having a degree from Blair is that it’s still a degree from Vanderbilt, so in terms of finding good jobs on the side or perhaps eventually wanting to get a degree in something else, I still have that strong academic qualification with a focus in something that is unique.”

Yes, her schedule can be grueling. But, like Bavli, when you believe that “you never really reach a point when you’re ‘done,’ because you can always improve when it comes to honing a craft,” grueling becomes your new normal.

In the SEC, It Just Means More.

To Bavli, It Just Means More of a Knack for Hitting the Right Note.