Laurel Parsons

Before coming to Quest in 2009, Laurel Parsons taught music theory and/or aural skills at the University of British Columbia, the University of Oregon, Kwantlen University College and, most recently, Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. At Queen's, she served as faculty advisor for all first-year music students, and the School of Music student body named her the department's "Best Professor" for 2007-08.

Laurel's dissertation involved historical, literary and musical analysis of 20th-century British composer Elisabeth Lutyens's opera The Numbered. During her Ph.D. studies at UBC, she was awarded a 3-year Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and was recognized for excellence in teaching upper-level music theory classes with a UBC Graduate Teaching Award.

Throughout her years of dissertation research, Laurel was struck by the lack of attention paid to music by composers who happen to be female. As a result, she is currently writing and co-editing a book of analytical essays on music by women composers. In recent years, she has also become fascinated by the representation of Inuit culture and the Arctic in Canadian concert music, and considers her voyage 300 km north of the Arctic Circle to the University of Tromsø in Norway to deliver a presentation on this subject the highlight of her international-conference-paper-delivering career. Other interests include the neuroscience of music, music and medicine, and the relations between music and language.

As well as teaching music and humanities courses at Quest, Laurel conducts the choir and looks forward to establishing instrumental groups as the student body continues to grow.

Outside of Quest, Laurel enjoys serving as Chair of the North Vancouver Community Arts Council. But her favourite non-Quest activity is spending summers with her husband, four children and Labrador retriever on beautiful Savary Island, collecting beach glass, hiking the trails and obsessively doing 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles.