Artistic Director Joan Parsley is known internationally for her advocacy and special projects in the field of early music. Over the past 20 years in Milwaukee, she has been the recipient of Pro Musica Award by the Milwaukee Sentinel for her Beethoven In Vienna festival and exhibit and the Early Music America Early Music Brings History Alive National Award for her work on the music and life of J.S. Bach and his contemporaries (The American Bach Project). From 1996-2002, Parsley and her early music group Ensemble Musical Offering, later renamed Milwaukee Baroque, were Artists-in-Residence at Milwaukee’s All Saints’ Cathedral. In 2003, she was Cultural Program Coordinator for the School Sisters of St. Francis Saint Joseph Chapel.

Parsley has been an Honorary Scholar for the Wisconsin Humanities Council and independent study recipient with colleague Sy Kreilein for the National Endowment for the Humanities. With an intense interest in the decorative and visual arts as well as a broad network of early music conductors, museum curators, and scholars, Parsley co-curated Fashion and Furnishings in the Age of Mozart held at the Milwaukee Art Museum, and Beethoven in Vienna: The Second Style Period showcased at the Haggerty Art Museum.  An Aston Magna Foundation at Rutgers University scholarship recipient to study the Spanish Baroque, Parsley created and produced the special project Spain and Its New World Empire, 1550-1750.

In recent years, she has been researching and studying the music of the early to mid-1800’s in Germany and Austria which allowed Musical Offering to produce In Harmony: At Home with Biedermeier. The Vivaldi Project:  The Composer’s Affinity to the Natural World is Parsley’s most recent venture and will span the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 seasons.

She has studied 18th century early keyboard performance practice at the Oberlin Baroque Institute and Cornell University, as well as private studies with harpsichordists Edward Parmentier (University of Michigan-Ann Arbor), John Gibbons (Boston, MA), Gustav Leonhardt (Amsterdam) and Tom Koopman (Bussum).

Left:

Joan Parsley with an 1806 Broadwood fortepiano (London), Locust Grove Museum, Louisville, KY, April 1st, 2007 Performance

Right:

Double Manual Couchet Harpsichord Op. 186 made by Keith Hill, Manchester, MI, at the home of Joan Parsley.