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 sang with the Alliance Francaise Chorale du Grand Phoenix as a charter member since 1997. Following the death of the founder, Angela Morley, in 2009, Ethel accepted the position of Conductor of the Alliance Francaise Chorale.

She 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 forty 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 MusicaNova Orchestra, 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 as "Goodwill Ambassador" for an exciting new venture, PHOENIX OPERA, which debuted its first production, LA BOHEME, on December 21, 2007, at the Orpheum Theatre in Phoenix. Ethel sang in the PHOENIX OPERA Chorus for the very exciting and moving "Dmitri Hvorostovsky Gala" on January 10, 2012.