Artistic Director Joan Parsley with WI Public Radio Host Laurie Skelto

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

Artistic Director Joan Parsley is known internationally for her advocacy and special projects in the field of early music. Over the past 25 years in Milwaukee, she has been the recipient of the 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 1999-2003, Ms. Parsley and Ensemble Musical Offering, were Artists-in-Residence at Milwaukee's The Cathedral Church of All Saints. With a passion and commitment to music education in the elementary grades, they were members of the Milwaukee Symphony's Project ACE. Ms. Parsley has also served as Cultural Program Coordinator for the School Sisters of St. Francis Saint Joseph Chapel in Milwaukee.

Combining the performing arts with the humanities, Ms. Parsley has been an Honorary Scholar for the Wisconsin Humanities Council and independent study recipient with colleague Sylvester Kreilein, Ph.D., for the National Endowment for the Humanities. With an intense interest in language, history, religion, the decorative and visual arts as well as assembling a broad network of early music conductors, museum curators, and scholars, Parsley co-curated Fashion and Furnishings in the Age of Mozart at the Milwaukee Art Museum, and Beethoven in Vienna: The Second Style Period celebrated at the Haggerty Art Museum. An Aston Magna Foundation at Rutgers University scholarship recipient to study the Spanish Baroque, Ms. 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. Her most recent venture, The Vivaldi Project: The Composer's Affinity to the Natural World, will span the 2010-2012 concert seasons.

Ms. Parsley has studied 18th century early keyboard performance practice at the Oberlin Baroque Performance 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). Over the years, she has performed with the Racine Symphony, Kenosha Symphony, Sullivan Ensemble, Milwaukee Symphony and Madison Chamber Orchestra.

She is an avid paperweight collector and lover of period gardens.