Biography
Parker Ramsay has expanded the harp’s available literature by preparing numerous transcriptions and by commissioning original scores for the instrument, turning to it as his primary medium after earlier training on period keyboard instruments. Wesley David Parker Ramsay entered the world in August 1991 in Burns, Tennessee. Both of his parents were musicians; his mother, harpist Carol McClure, joined his father in providing a partial homeschool education that included harp lessons from her. At seventeen he became the first American chosen as organ scholar at King’s College, Cambridge. Under music director Stephen Cleobury he sang in the 2012 Festival of Lessons and Carols at King’s College Chapel and traveled with the choir on six international tours while participating in four recordings. In 2014 he captured first prize at the Amsterdam International Organ Competition. Following a bachelor’s degree in history from Cambridge, he completed master’s and artist-diploma studies in historical keyboards at Oberlin Conservatory, then studied harp at the Juilliard School with New York Philharmonic principal harpist Nancy Allen. Although his debut recording, released in 2018, presented organ works by George Whitefield Chadwick, he has since devoted himself exclusively to the harp and occasionally describes himself as a “recovering organist.” Composers whose new pieces he has requested include Marc Satterwhite, Tengku Irfan, and Saad Haddad. Together with gambist Arnie Tanimoto he leads the ensemble A Golden Wire, which concentrates on French and English repertory of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He also teaches and publishes on historical instruments and performance practice, with appearances at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, collaborations with the Smithsonian Collection, and articles in Early Music America and the New York Times. His website notes that he has “sought to take inspiration from the examples of Glenn Gould and Gustav Leonhardt to ask how musicians move beyond mere questions of instrumentation and into deeper investigations of color and harmony. The harp can be seen as a happy medium, being a plucked instrument that is also sensitive to pressure and dynamic expression.” Those convictions guided his unconventional decision to record Bach’s Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, on the harp in 2020, an undertaking that earned widespread critical praise.
Albums
