|
Ethel Harris holds bachelor's and master's degrees from
Northwestern University's School of Music specializing in music
education and piano performance. She began teaching piano at the
age of seventeen on the recommendation of her piano pedagogy
professor, Louis Crowder, and she has had many years of
experience in all facets of music education as well as piano
performance.
Ethel's early teachers were Hulda Brethauer, Mildred Butler and
Bessie Ash Noack in Belleville, Illinois, a suburb of St. Louis,
Missouri. Harold Zabrack, a noted piano pedagogue in St. Louis,
and Professor of Piano at Westminster Choir College in
Princeton, New Jersey, prepared her for entrance to Northwestern
University. Her undergraduate piano professor was Ms. Wanda
Paul, a legendary pianist in Chicago, and it was at Northwestern
University that Ethel was inducted into Mu Phi Epsilon, a
musical honorary. Louis Crowder was her professor of piano at
Northwestern for her master's degree. Following university
studies, Harris studied with Vitya Vronsky Babin, of the famed
Vronsky and Babin Piano Duo, and Vronsky's assistant, Olga
Radosavljevich, at the Cleveland Institute of Music. In Arizona,
she studied with Professors Eugene Pridonoff and James Ruccolo
at Arizona State University School of Music.
Ethel Harris has performed as a soloist, with chamber music
groups, choral and orchestral organizations and has taught piano
and vocal music in schools and private studios in Illinois,
Louisiana, Ohio and Arizona. She served on the Board of
Directors of the Phoenix Chamber Music Society for more than ten
years. In that capacity, she conceptualized and created a
program to develop an audience for chamber music in Phoenix
area. This Audience Development Project, as it was called, first
obtained funding from state and city sources of funds for the
arts. Harris coordinated and marketed chamber music programs to
Phoenix area schools. The internationally known chamber
musicians performing in regularly scheduled concerts for the
Phoenix Chamber Music Society played the performances. She
planned and provided all arrangements for these visiting
musicians, including transportation and hospitality.
Harris sings with the Alliance Francaise Chorale du Grand
Phoenix as a charter member and performs as half of the Lumiere
Duo with flutist, Celinda Anne Levno. She has been a performing
member of the Monday Morning Musicale, a group of musicians who
have been active in the Phoenix area for over thirty-five years.
Ethel is the piano accompanist for the TREMBLE CLEFS, a
performing choral group made up of persons living with
Parkinson's disease, their spouses and caregivers. In addition,
she is a pianist with MUSICA NOVA, a professional orchestra
formed in 2003 of more than sixty musicians based in Northeast
Maricopa County.
Ethel sang the Mozart REQUIEM with conductor, John Massaro, as
part of 6 Arizona choral groups singing in Carnegie Hall in June
2005! In May of 2006, she traveled to Eastern Europe with
Arizona Masterworks Chorale and Friends to sing "In the
Footsteps of Mozart" for the 250th birthday celebration year
with John Massaro, conductor. The group sang choral music of
Mozart in Krakow, Budapest, Prague, Ceske Budovice and Vienna in
venues where Mozart himself performed and conducted.
Ethel Harris is a member of the management team for an exciting
new venture, the PHOENIX METROPOLITAN OPERA company, which will
debut its first production, LA BOHEME, on December 21, 2007, at
the Orpheum Theatre of Phoenix.
|