MA Top 30 Professional: Susann McDonald

Harpist, Educator, Founder & Artistic Director (Emeritus)
USA International Harp Competition

According to family lore, Susann McDonald knew very early on what she would do with her life.

“In the third grade,” she said in an interview, “I wore white gloves to school. My teacher suggested I take them off, but I responded that I needed to protect my fingers as I was going to be a concert harpist.”

The Rock Island, IL, third-grader was right. At age 17, with Europe still struggling to recover from World War II, McDonald sailed to France for a summer studying with world-famous teacher Henriette Renié. After extensive lessons in France, including study at the Paris Conservatory, she returned to the U.S., where she launched a long and successful international career. Among its many highlights, she performed before 60,000 people in Chicago’s Soldier Field during the annual Chicagoland Music Festival. (Patti Page was the headliner.) She concertized in Israel, South America, and on radio and television both stateside and in Europe. In 1958, she gave three Carnegie Hall recitals in one week, each including only music originally written for harp.

But teaching was also dear to McDonald’s heart. (She taught her first class as a teenager.) At one point she headed harp departments at the University of Arizona, University of Southern California, and California State College at Los Angeles. From 1975 to 1985 she led the harp department at The Juilliard School.

“Performing is a rather lonely way of life,” she said in an interview with American Harp Journal. “Teaching has always been intensely satisfying to me, with its many opportunities to directly influence and help others on a day-to-day basis.”

In 1981 she became head of the harp department at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington, eventually expanding it into the world’s largest collegiate harp department. She founded the USA International Harp Competition, and in 1989 was named Distinguished Professor of Music at IU.

Harp is not her sole focus. She loves reading thrillers and harbors an ambition to write a story about “a good-natured harpist who travels throughout the world and solves cases.”

Golf is another passion. On her bucket list: “I would love to make a hole in one.”