Barbara Harbach  
 

Dr. Barbara Harbach is the Curators’ Distinguished Professor Emerita of Music at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She is an organist and harpsichordist, composer, and musicologist. In addition to performing around the world and composing in a number of genres, including opera and ballet, she has been a passionate advocate for the music underrepresented composers: Mexican, Black, and particularly women. In 1989, she founded Vivace Press to publish the music of historical women and underrepresented composers.   

Harbach first performed on a pump organ in the Appalachian hills of Pennsylvania and then received a baccalaureate degree in music from Penn State and a master of musical arts degree from Yale. She studied with Helmut Walcha and was awarded the Konzertdiplom from the Musikhochschule-Frankfurt. As a doctoral student at Eastman School of Music, she became interested in recovering women’s keyboard music. Read the fascinating story of her musical advocacy by Cynthia Green Libby in “From Bach to Vivace Press: The Metamorphosis of Barbara Harbach.” 
Harbach has edited multiple volumes of historical organ works, including the work of Elizabeth Sterling, a Victorian English organist I will feature in March, as well as Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (German composer, conductor, and pianist), Ann Mounsey Bartholomew (English pianist, organist, and composer), Maddalena Lombardini Sirmen (Italian composer, violinist, and singer), and Clara Schumann (German pianist, composer, and teacher). These editions can be ordered from Vivace Press. 

Recordings of Harbach’s compositions are available on the MSR Classics, Naxos, Gasparo, Kingdom, Albany and Northeastern labels, and her music is published by Hester Park, Robert King Music, Elkan-Vogel, Augsburg Fortress, Agape Music, Vivace Press, and Art of Sound Music. 

The August 17, 2020 episode of Pipedreams featured two of Harbach’s hymn tunes. She performs her arrangements of O waly, waly and Kingsfold (with surprise twists) on the 1965 Aeolian-Skinner organ at the Christ Church Cathedral in Saint Louis. Her performance is between minute 11:20 and 18:20. 

P.S. Here is additional information about Ethel Smyth, the organist spotlighted in the November newsletter: Leah Broad writes in The Guardian, “Without Ethel Smyth and classical music’s forgotten women, we only tell half the story.”