About

Parker Ramsay has forged a career that defies classification. Whether premiering, rediscovering, or transcribing, he dedicates himself to expanding the harp’s repertoire, bringing the instrument to conversations — and audiences — it had never before known.

Ramsay has given solo performances at Alice Tully Hall, the Miller Theatre at Columbia University, The 92nd Street Y, the Phillips Collection, Cal Performances, Shriver Hall, IRCAM, King’s College, Cambridge, the Spoleto Festival USA, and the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA. He has collaborated with ensembles such Mark Morris Dance Group, Apollo’s Fire, and the Van Kuijk Quartet, and has undertaken residencies at the University of California, San Diego, Princeton University, and IRCAM.

Ramsay’s 2020 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations was praised as “remarkably special” (Gramophone), “nuanced and insightful” (BBC Music Magazine), “relentlessly beautiful” (WQXR), and “marked by a keen musical intelligence” (Wall Street Journal); he celebrated the album’s release with a performance at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. His latest album, released in October 2022, features The Street, a new concert-length work for solo harp and text by Nico Muhly and Alice Goodman, which premiered at King’s College, Cambridge in April 2022 and received its U.S. premiere at the Spoleto Festival USA the next month. Since then, Ramsay has performed The Street throughout the United States and United Kingdom, most recently with new choreography by Mark Morris Dance Group.

A fierce advocate for new harp music, Ramsay premieres pieces which explore the frontiers of his instrument’s capabilities. In May 2025, he debuted at New York City’s 92nd Street Y with a slate of works written in his name: the world premiere of Aida Shirazi’s A Dream Within a Dream for harp, voice, and live electronics; Marcos Balter’s Omolu, commissioned in 2021 by Columbia University’s Miller Theatre for their podcast series Mission: Commission; and Artun Çekem’s 2024 HARP (Haptic-Adaptive Remembrance Processor), which harnesses a custom touch-based interface to synthesize its operator’s live input in real time. In the 2024-25 season, he made debuts at Utrecht’s Gaudeamus Festival with Lucy McKnight’s when i am among the trees (written for a custom-built harp-organ pipe-percussion instrument); in Dublin with a new evening-length harp-and-voice work by Connor Way and Iarla Ó Lionáird; and at Montreal’s Salle Bourgie with the Quatuor Van Kuijk. In 2023, Ramsay made his Paris debut with Josh Levine’s Anyway, the culmination of a yearlong residency at IRCAM. In April 2025, he chronicled his commissioning efforts in a guest essay for The New York Times.

Equally comfortable on modern and historical harps, Ramsay co-directs the New York period-instrument ensemble A Golden Wire with viola da gamba player Arnie Tanimoto; they tour the United States extensively, having appeared at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Aspect Chamber Music Series, Chatham Baroque, and Bach Ascending. He has presented talks, performances and lectures on period instruments at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnegie Mellon University,  and the Royal Academy of Music, London. As a writer, he has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Early Music America, and VAN.

In the 2025-26 season, Ramsay reprises The Street at the newly-reopened Frick Collection in New York. Also in New York, he returns to the Kaufman Music Center for a solo harp-and-harpsichord recital centered around new works by Georg Friedrich Haas and Christopher Trapani, and to The Bohemians, Brooklyn Public Library, and Aspect Chamber Music Series with A Golden Wire.

Raised in Tennessee, Parker began harp studies with his mother, Carol McClure. He served as organ scholar at King’s College, Cambridge before pursuing graduate studies at Oberlin and Juilliard. He lives in New York City and is pursuing a Ph.D in historical musicology at Columbia University.