Instructor in Music Performance Barbara Phillips-Farley teaches, practices, performs, and researches. A pianist by training and a scholar through her education. Phillips-Farley combines these passions.  She is learning two Shostakovich chamber works, a quintet and a sonata for viola and piano, to read with the Alexander String Quartet, whose members serve as quartet-in-residence at St. Lawrence each year.   She’s also working on a book review of a biography of Tin Pan Alley’s lyricist Johnny Mercer.

Phillips-Farley has had her share of memorable experiences as a faculty member at St. Lawrence. She developed courses in subjects she loves, such as Tin Pan Alley songs, Schubert lieder, and the milieu of Clara and Robert Schumann. “Helping students to play ‘by ear’, taking students to their first orchestra concert at the National Arts Center in Ottawa, Canada and having students discover something brilliant in a piece of classical music--all of these experiences are very fulfilling.” Even after students graduate, Phillips-Farley maintains relationships with the students and also some parents. “The four years that we have with these remarkable folks are, in some cases, the start of a lovely, long friendship.”

Phillips-Farley attended Oberlin College and University of Iowa for her undergraduate and graduate studis.