Dr. Joshua Harper joined Wilkes this fall as an assistant professor of choral music and applied voice. He is also the director of choirs.
Harper received a bachelor of arts in vocal performance and a bachelor of arts in music composition and theory at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tenn. He then received a masters in choral conducting at University of Massachusetts Amherst in Amherst, Mass. He later received a doctorate in choral conducting at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington, Ind.
Harper is from Huntsville, Ala., and now lives in Dunmore, Pa,. with his wife. They moved from Arizona when she was offered a position at the University of Scranton.
“I had to get rid of my accent because choral music has a lot to do with vowels, and so I had a teacher tell me that if I wanted to be successful in my career, I would need to get rid of my southern accent,” said Harper.
Harper started his undergraduate degree as a finance major with a music minor.
“I’ve sung and played piano for most of my life, but when it came time to come to college, I didn’t think that I could make a career by singing,” said Harper.
After taking various business and music classes, he decided that music was his passion, and so he changed his business major to one in music.
“[I] learned a few years later that conducting voices was what really brought me the most amount of joy, and figured out that I enjoyed working with other people with students, and so I’m fast-forwarding through a lot of years, but ultimately being able to teach and conduct music is really what I love to do,” said Harper.
Harper currently teaches choir, voice lesions and music theory. He likes the fact that most professors at Wilkes do not just teach one class, as a lot of his past professors have.
“There’s so much culture. There is, in my opinion, great weather and full four seasons, and just a lot of opportunities professionally as a conductor and musician,” said Harper.
Harper is excited to share his music with the community, both the university and town of Wilkes-Barre.
“Wilkes has a history of a really successful choral program, and there’s a lot of wonderful alumni I’ve already met in the area, both because of COVID and how it affected everyone, just because of some other things that happened over the past couple of years, this program has a lot of room for growth, and I’m really excited to hopefully bring the choral music program in particular back to the reputation that it had for so many years,” said Harper.
In his free time, Harper enjoys English Premier League football, which is a fantasy sports league. He explained that there are about 10 million people who play in the world, and last year he came in 47,000.
One piece of advice Harper advises students is from an old professor of his. He explained that you don’t know who you are until you’re 30 years old so quit trying so hard to figure it out until then.
“I tell my students is also about becoming a better person and part of that is learning a little bit more about yourself and that may mean changing your finance major to a vocal performance major but that also could end up really being who you are and defining the rest of your life in your career as it has for mine,” said Harper.