As a Fulbright Fellow, he studied Indian music in Madras for two years before continuing at Princeton where he received a Ph.D. in musicology.
Powers returned to India several times to study music there on John D. Rockefeller III and Fulbright Senior fellowships.
[3] He did this in a number of articles, including “Mode” in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980),[4] a landmark of scholarship on the subject, "Tonal types and modal categories in Renaissance polyphony" (1981),[5] "Modal representations in polyphonic offertories" [based mostly on Palestrina's Offertoria cycle] (1982),[6] "Is mode real?"
(1992),[7] "Anomalous modalities" (1996),[8] “Language Models and Musical Analysis,”[9] and “Puccini’s Turandot: The End of the Great Tradition,”[10] Powers was the first foreigner to perform at the Tyagaraja Aradhana in Thiruvaiyaru, India.
[11] The Harold Powers World Travel Fund, administered by the American Musicological Society, was established in 2006 to “encourage and assist Ph.D. candidates, post-docs, and junior faculty in all fields of musical scholarship to travel anywhere in the world to carry out the necessary work for their dissertation or other research.