Harry Searing

Harry Searing is an active freelance artist on both bassoon and contrabassoon in the New York City area and has been for over 35 years. Most notably, he has performed many concerts with the New York Philharmonic under such great conductors as Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, Zubin Mehta, and Erich Leinsdorf. In addition to performing with practically every classical organization in the New York and New Jersey area, he has performed with several distinguished groups while on tour, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Sir Georg Solti, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra.

In 2002 Harry took up the Heckelphone and performed nine concerts with three different organizations – the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, the American Symphony Orchestra and the New York City Opera, on that extremely rare instrument. In 2005, he traveled to Hong Kong three different times to perform on the Heckelphone. Harry can be heard as bassoon soloist in the soundtrack to Brian DePalma’s 2004 film, Femme Fatale.

Harry is on the faculty of the John J. Cali School of Music at Montclair State University, the City University of New York and the Manhattan School of Music Precollege Division.

In addition to performing, Harry has an extensive career in music publishing, having worked for such publishers as Boosey & Hawkes, Schott, and G. Schirmer. In 2003, he started his own publishing firm, LRQ Publishing, devoted to the bassoon music of the great Brazilian composer Francisco Mignone.

He is a graduate of the Manhattan School of Music where he studied with the great teacher, Stephen Maxym.

Harry lives in Bloomfield, New Jersey with his wife Sandy, also an MSM alumna, now a school administrator in New Providence, NJ and their two sons, Jonathan and Matthew.

Manhattan School of Music Precollege faculty since 2007.