ADRIAN — Music brought Phillip and Kristin Clark together in a professional capacity. And then, it created the personal connection leading to their marriage.

Kristin, now an associate professor of music at Adrian College and chair of the Performing Arts Department, began teaching at the college in 2011, while Phil, who’s now an assistant professor and director of choir and orchestra as well as the college’s organist, arrived in 2013. The summer after his first year, he messaged her about a collaboration … and got no response.

Eventually, however, the pair did indeed perform together, and not long after that they began dating. And, a year after that, they were married, with each of them bringing children from their previous marriages into their blended family.

The Clarks took rather different paths to where they are now in the music world.

Kristin, a mezzo-soprano who was born in Ypsilanti to parents who both taught high school music and theater, didn’t take voice lessons as a child, and in fact was something of a late bloomer in the field. She went to the University of Michigan not really knowing what she wanted to do with her life — law, perhaps, or psychology.

“I wasn’t keyed into the fact that my voice was anything special,” she said.

Then she got into the university choir, and one day the conductor pulled her aside to talk to her only to discover that she wasn’t a music major. With such an affirmation of her vocal abilities, she decided her path lay in music, and she went on to earn a degree in music education, master’s degrees in choral conducting and voice performance, and a DMA in voice performance.

Phil, on the other hand, started his musical training very early. The Oberlin, Ohio, native began piano lessons at age 6, and after the family moved to Toledo he got connected with the piano professor at the University of Toledo and ended up earning both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in piano performance there.

Both the Clarks, in addition to their teaching, maintain extremely busy schedules as performers. Kristin has performed in concerts and operas throughout the U.S. and internationally, and Phil is active both as a soloist and as an accompanist.

He much prefers the latter. “What I like about it is getting to make music with others,” he said. “There’s really nothing that compares to that. Being onstage with others is always more fun.”

And the connection between a recitalist and accompanist is quite unique. For a soloist, “the accompanist holds our fate in their hands,” Kristin said, laughing. “When something goes wrong, they’re the ones that fix it. And Phil is a fabulous pianist and a fabulous collaborator.”

Both the Clarks think their careers as performers are important to their careers as college educators. “It’s really important for our students to see us walking the walk,” Kristin said. “They can see that we’re actually exercising our passion.”

In fact, just this past June, some 30 members of the Adrian College Choir, which is directed by Phil, got to see Kristin doing exactly that, and in an up-close-and-personal way.

Kristin was the mezzo-soprano soloist for a performance of the Duruflé Requiem at Carnegie Hall that also included a choral ensemble made up of the Adrian College choir students, a high school choir, a community-college chorus, and a community chorus. The instrumentalists were the New York Chamber Ensemble and organist Aaron Tan.

The piece was conducted by Jerry Blackstone, who’s now a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan. Blackstone is “a superstar in the choral conducting world,” Kristin said, and she has sung many times under his baton including previously in this work. So, when he contacted her to ask her to participate, “I was like, ‘say no more, I’ll be there.’ ”

The performance was actually Kristin’s second at Carnegie Hall. Her first concert at the fabled venue, in 2015, was a Mahler performance — requiring her to sing “for about 30 minutes straight” — in Weill Recital Hall.

“It was a fabulous, special experience,” she said, and this June’s concert was even more so because it took place on the venue’s main stage, the Ronald O. Perelman Stage in Isaac Stern Auditorium.

Being in the Stern Auditorium, which has hosted performances since 1891 and featured some of history’s greatest musicians, “you think about how anyone you ever worshiped has performed on that stage,” she said.

Phil began working with the choir on the Duruflé piece early in the spring semester, adding rehearsals as time went by, and the intense efforts clearly paid off when Blackstone told Kristin that the Adrian College students had been leaders amongst the choral ensemble. “Musically, there was much to be proud of,” she said.

For the students, the trip was the opportunity of a lifetime for many reasons. Some had never been to New York City. Some had never been on a plane before. Some had never traveled at all, in fact. But here they were, performing at Carnegie Hall under Blackstone’s direction. “The opportunity for the students to work with him was one of the reasons we wanted them to go on this trip,” Kristin said.

And during the concert, “for me to turn around and see all these students of mine, it was so cool.”

Besides that, she said, “I know what an impact it had on me (as a music student) to get to go see my teacher sing, and at Carnegie Hall, my students got to see me do that.”

It didn’t help, though, that she was “super-sick” the day of the concert, waking up that morning with no voice. But being in that historic venue boosted her. Sitting there onstage waiting for her time to sing, “I felt like everyone who’d sung there before me was supporting me,” she said.

Local music lovers will get their own opportunity to hear both Kristin’s voice and the results of Phil’s work with the Adrian College Choir next year as part of a performance of Haydn’s Paukenmesse with the Adrian Symphony Orchestra. The concert is at 7:30 p.m. Friday, May 2, 2025.