Biography

Patricia Harper enjoys a career as performer, educator and scholar. A graduate of Smith College with honors and Yale University School of Music, Ms. Harper taught flute at Connecticut College from 1975-2021. At the college she directed an annual “Bach to Back” series for ten years, a “Women in Music” series for six years, and she was a founding member of the Connecticut College Woodwind Quintet. From 1989 to 1997 she directed Trevor Wye’s Residency Master Class there and was on that class’s teaching staff beginning in 1994. Since 1998 Harper began teaching her own summer flute courses in Connecticut, Vermont, South Carolina, and California. She also taught as adjunct Professor in the Honors College at Southern Connecticut State University from 1996-2006.

Performances have been as far-reaching as Canada, Scotland, England, and throughout the United States. Ms. Harper is Editor of reconstructed scores of the flute duets of Kuhlau (McGinnis and Marx), consulting Editor for the award-winning 1994 edition of “Sonata for Flute and Piano” by Poulenc (Chester Music), and co-Editor with Paula Robison of the award-winning “The Sidney Lanier Collection” (Universal Editions). In addition, with Hannah Porter Occeña as Associate Editor, she has self-published an urtext edition of Prokofiev’s “Sonata for Flute and Piano in D Major”, Opus 94 in 2021. Harper was author and narrator of “The Remarkable Career of Julius Baker” on CD from the Manhattan Flute Center, Inc. She has been a judge for various competitions for the National Flute Association and has given many presentations at that association’s annual conventions, at universities nationally, as well as at British Flute Society conventions in England. She has served as Secretary of the National Flute Association and as Chair of its Special Publications Committee during which time she was responsible for the publication of Volume 5 of its Historic Recordings Series: Frances Blaisdell.  Harper is listed in “Who’s Who in American Women”. In 2018 she received from Marquis ‘Who’s Who”, a Lifetime Achievement Award for outstanding work in music and in 2021 in “Who’s Who Top Educators” for “dedication, achievements and leadership in music education”. Harper’s teachers included Frances Blaisdell, Samuel Baron, and Thomas Nyfenger.