Gail Archer is the Director of the Music Program at Barnard College and conductor of the Barnard-Columbia Chorus. She is a member of the Music History faculty at the Manhattan School of Music, where she teaches courses in early opera and Baroque music, and also serves as Music Director and Organist at All Saints Episcopal Church in Manhattan.

Ms. Archer holds a BA in music education from Montclair State College, Upper Montclair, New Jersey, and an MA in piano from the Hartt College of Music, University of Hartford, Hartford, Connecticut. During the academic year 1983-84, she was a Research Fellow at Yale University, completing a project on the sixteenth-century Italian madrigal under Dr. Craig Monson and Dr. Claude Palisca. Ms. Archer completed an MMus in choral conducting under Amy Kaiser at the Mannes College of Music in 1987, and holds a DMA in organ performance from the Manhattan School of Music, where she received the Helen Cohn Prize as the outstanding graduate in the doctoral program.

Her thesis project, a modern edition and translation of Cantate, ariete a una, due, e tre voci by the seventeenth-century Venetian composer Barbara Strozzi, has recently been published in A–R Editions Recent Researches series, and an accompanying CD will be released by PGM Quintessential Sound in Feburary 1998. http://www.gailarcher.com [1]