Frances Conover Fitch

Frances Conover Fitch is a harpsichord and organ soloist and a “delightfully inventive and compelling” continuo player. She teaches at Tufts and Brandeis Universities and The New England Conservatory and also teaches harpsichord and Body Mapping in her home studio. She is Minister of Music at St. John's Church in Beverly Farms, MA, and is a Member of the Corporation of the Boston Early Music Festival.

Ms Fitch has been a student of the Alexander Technique since the 1970′s, finding in it an awareness crucial to her life as a performer. In recent years, she has been delighted to learn and now teach the powerful insights of Body Mapping helping other musicians to play with greater ease, expressivity, freedom, and comfort.

Ms. Fitch performs with numerous American early music ensembles and has participated in major music festivals, including Tanglewood, and Tage Alter Musik (Regensburg). Among many recordings are a solo disk on Wildboar and a 2-CD release of music of Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre.

Frances Fitch was on the faculty of the Longy School of Music for nearly three decades, teaching harpsichord, organ, chamber music, figured bass improvisation, and bibliographic research. She served as Chair of the Early Music department and as Acting Academic Dean. In 2006, Longy awarded her the George Seaman Award for Excellence in the Art of Teaching.

As a visiting professor at Wellesley College and East Carolina University, Ms. Fitch performed, coached ensembles, and gave group and private lessons in harpsichord, performance practice, and figured bass. In 2012-13, Ms. Fitch was a full-time Guest Professor in the Performing Arts division of Ferris University in Yokohama, Japan. With Jack Ashworth of the University of Louisville, she is co-author of the figured bass workbook, Running the Numbers.

Ms Fitch’s teachers were Gustav Leonhardt, Yuko Hayashi, John Gibbons, and Veronica Hampe. At the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Switzerland, she served as continuo player for student recitals and master classes.

A recent project with The Newberry Consort, Celestial Sirens, has produced several concerts in Chicago and Cleveland featuring vocal, instrumental and keyboard works by and for women from 17th-century Italy and Mexico. The broadcasts of this program by American Public Radio have joined Ms. Fitch’s list of radio recordings by national stations of numerous European countries, from the United Kingdom to Austria and Spain.