Harlow studied first with clarinetist Gary Foster, then Mitchell Lurie, and at the age of twenty-one, joined the Utah Symphony where he served as Associate Principal Clarinet.
He also studied with Harold (Buddy) Wright, the late Principal Clarinet with the Boston Symphony, and with violinist Charles Libove.
The etudes are paraphrasic – melodic studies on difficult solo passages from Thomas, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakoff.
Harlow turned the work he had originally planned for an interactive DVD-Rom history of the clarinet into the website ClarinetCentral.com.
He released a CD titled Works for Clarinets and Strings by Ingolf Dahl, Bohuslav Martinu and Karel Husa on the ISOMIKE label.