Chatham Baroque

Historical harpist Paula Fagerberg appears regularly at university concert halls and early music festivals throughout the United States and abroad. Active as a soloist, lecturer-clinician, chamber musician, and a continuo player in Baroque opera and chamber orchestras, she specializes in the harps, historical playing techniques, and repertoire of the late Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical eras.

Paula attended graduate school on full scholarship at Indiana University’s Early Music Institute, where she studied the art of continuo with lutenist Nigel North and historical harps with Andrew Lawrence-King. She also holds a Bachelor of Music degree in historical harp performance summa cum laude from Clayton State University, where she was named a Spivey Scholar and awarded the honor of The University System of Georgia Outstanding Scholar for her graduating class.

Based in Atlanta, Paula performs regularly there with local ensembles as well as with other early music ensembles around the country. Internationally, Paula has given solo harp performances at the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm as well as at the private residence of the U.S. ambassador to Sweden, performed a concert on rare 200-year-old single-action pedal harps at Oxford University,  and done a concert tour of Perú and Bolívia (including the Misiones de Chiquitos festival) of colonial Latin American music, played on the Spanish arpa de dos órdenes. For several years Paula has been closely associated with the early music department at the University of North Texas, being a frequent guest artist there for concerts, tours, and recordings.

Paula was featured in the PBS documentary Harp Dreams (released 2011) as an expert on the history of the harp. She is the co-founder of the emerging touring ensemble Armonia Celeste, which specializes in the Italian music of the late Renaissance and early Baroque. The ensemble, comprised of three women's voices accompanied by period plucked-string instruments, was a finalist in the 2011 Early Music America/Naxos recording competition; was filmed for an upcoming documentary by Early Music Television on the birth of Italian opera, expected to air on PBS in 2012; and has recently recorded its debut CD of music from the seventeenth-century court of the powerful Barberini family, expected out later this year.

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