Parker Ramsay

Parker Ramsay has greatly enlarged the repertory for the harp through transcriptions and commissions of new music for his chosen instrument, pursuing a professional career on it after studying historical keyboards as well. Wesley David Parker Ramsay was born in August of 1991 in Burns, Tennessee. His parents were both musicians; his mother was harpist Carol McClure, and Ramsay was partly homeschooled by them both, learning harp from his mother. Ramsay was named an organ scholar at King's College, Cambridge, when he was 17, becoming the first American to hold that position. Working under music director Stephen Cleobury, he performed in the 2012 Festival of Lessons and Carols at King's College Chapel, as well as joining the choir on six international tours and four recordings. In 2014, he won first prize at the Amsterdam International Organ Competition. After earning a bachelor's degree in history from Cambridge, he moved on to Oberlin Conservatory, where he earned a master's degree and artist diploma in historical keyboards. He then worked at the Juilliard School with New York Philharmonic principal harpist Nancy Allen. His first album, issued in 2018, was of organ music by George Whitefield Chadwick, but he has since dedicated his career solely to the harp, sometimes referring to himself as a "recovering organist." He often commissions new works by such composers as Marc Satterwhite, Tengku Irfan, and Saad Haddad. He and gambist Arnie Tanimoto are co-directors of A Golden Wire, an ensemble specializing French and English music of the 16th and 17th centuries. Ramsay also lectures and writes about historical instruments and performance, appearing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with the Smithsonian Collection, and in print in Early Music America and the New York Times. In the words of his website, Ramsay "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." These ideas had an impact on Ramsay's unorthodox choice of the harp for a 2020 recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, which was a critical success.
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