Barbara was born on June 14, 1945 as Barbara Ann Ellingson in Evansville, Indiana, and died on January 24, 2024 at the Mid-Hudson Regional Hospital in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., after a two-and-one-half yearslong struggle against endometrial cancer. She was 78 years old. She was the only biological child of Mary Ross Ellingson, a classical archeologist and teacher of Greek and Latin, and Rudolph C. Ellingson, a chemist who developed the first patented sulfa drugs. Barbara attended Evansville public schools and graduated as salutatorian from high school in 1963. By then she was an accomplished clarinet player and choral singer, too – having studied for five summers at the Interlochen (Michigan) Center for the Arts as well – and went on to major in music at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, where she earned her B. A., cum laude, in 1967.
Her M. A. and Ph.D. in musicology followed at New York University, and her dissertation, Ton und Wort: The Lieder of Richard Strauss, became for many years the standard book on Strauss’s art-songs and was later translated into German. During this period she married Geoffrey Petersen, a Carleton classmate, though she divorced him later. (He died in 2015.) But by 1977 she was recognized in academia and, soon, in business as Barbara Petersen and continued using that surname.
From 1977 to 2011 she was a classical music executive at Broadcast Music Inc., protecting contemporary composers’ and their publishers’ copyrights, a demanding job she enjoyed and excelled at. Meanwhile she and her second husband (as of 1982), opera and concert baritone and old-school poet Roger Roloff, had been avidly cultivating organic food and flower gardens at their New Paltz, N.Y. home since 1987. The couple was well known also for leading wildflower walks at the Mohonk Preserve and for the Lifetime Learning Institute in New Paltz. In 1996 Barbara and Roger established research on pink lady’s-slipper orchids at the Preserve; he continues this work. And in 2012 the couple founded Poet’s Preserve, a private parcel under a conservation easement to protect wild plants and animals depending for survival on those acres.
At Barbara’s death she was active as a longtime board member of the Poné Ensemble for New Music in New Paltz and for New York Women Composers, and had recently retired from the board of New Music USA. Donations in her memory may be made to Elting Memorial Library, 93 Main St., New Paltz, N.Y. 12561 or to the Mohonk Preserve, P.O. Box 715, New Paltz, NY 12561. A memorial tribute to Barbara at the Copeland-Hammerl Funeral Home is planned for the coming spring, after the first wildflowers have bloomed.
She leaves behind her broken-hearted husband of 42 years; her adopted sister, Susan M. Phillips, nephew Shan Sullivan and niece Sabrina Bond; sister-in-law Lynn Fearneyhough and husband Robert, niece Juli Gallagher and husband James and grandniece Katherine “Katie” Gallagher; and nephew John Mortz and wife Jennifer. Many friends and colleagues join in mourning her passing as well. Barbara was a hard-working, fun-loving person, naturally kind-hearted, and modest about her many achievements (it takes an obituary writer to toot her horn). She was a genuine sweetheart with high standards whose greatest gift of love was the supreme happiness she gave to her husband and soul-mate. Her breed of human being is all too rare. May her spirit rest in peace.
Online condolences can be left for Barbara at www.copelandhammerl.com.
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