Selected Composer Biographies

CARL CROSIER (1945-2014) retired from the Lutheran Church of Honolulu where he spent 38 years as organist, music director, and cantor. He was known primarily as a conductor and countertenor soloist, and spent his early years as a pianist playing solo recitals and chamber music concerts. Under his leadership, the church music program grew from a modest choir of a dozen members to four choirs involving 70 people every week, including a mixed choir, a contemporary ensemble, a children’s choir and orchestra, and an all-male Compline Choir, patterned after the Compline Singers of St. Mark’s Cathedral, Seattle.

DAVID DAHL spent many years as Organ and Church Music Professor at Pacific Lutheran University and Director of Music at Christ Church, Tacoma, WA and is now retired. He has been active with the American Guild of Organists and the Organ Historical Society. He is widely known as a teacher, improviser and published composer.

PETER HALLOCK (1924-2014). Few musicians have been more important to modern Episcopal church music than Peter Hallock. During his 40 years at St. Mark’s Cathedral, Seattle, he produced a remarkable legacy: a daunting number of published and unpublished compositions, including numerous motets as well as large-scale anthems with instrumental accompaniment. A three-year cycle of psalm settings for choir with congregational antiphons is the most popular Psalter in common use in both the Episcopal and Lutheran denominations in the United States. At the Cathedral itself, Hallock’s legacy includes the acquisition of the landmark Flentrop tracker organ, the weekly Compline service, the annual Messiah performances on period instruments (no longer done in this millenium), and a national reputation for the great musical tradition he brought about. The popularity of Compline at St. Mark’s spawned a revival in interest in this service, now included in the prayer books of Lutheran and Episcopal denominations worldwide. His musical accomplishments have been recognized by numerous degrees and honors: Doctor of Sacred Music, honoris causa, from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific (the Episcopal seminary of the western United States); Associate of the Royal School of Church Music; Associate of the Royal College of Music; Master of Music in Organ Performance and Composition (University of Washington); Canon Precentor (emeritus), St. Mark’s Cathedral; and Canon of Honor, Diocese of Olympia. Dr. Hallock was the second lay person in the Episcopal Church to be given the title of Canon Precentor, indicating his importance not only as a composer and musician, but also as a contributor to the liturgy of St. Mark’s and the Diocese of Olympia.  He also served as organist at St. Clement’s Parish, Seattle. Peter Hallock’s official obituary may be viewed here.

MARTIN HOW is a British composer and organist. He was born in Liverpool, moved to Glasgow just before the second world war, and educated at Repton School where he was a music scholar. He was awarded an organ scholarship at Clare College, Cambridge, where he studied music and theology. In this post he was responsible for the Chapel Choir of Men and Boys, and the Choral Society. For some years, he was Organist and Choirmaster at Grimsby Parish church, but spent most of his career with the Royal School of Church Music, as a trainer of young singers. He initiated and developed the RSCM Chorister Training Scheme which has been used all over the world. Since his retirement he has returned to organ playing as an honorary member of the music staff at Croydon Parish.

RODNEY LISTER is a Boston-based composer who studied at the New England Conservatory of Music and at Brandeis University. In between his stay at those two institutions, he lived in England where he studied privately with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. Rodney Lister has received commissions, grants, and fellowships from the Berkshire Music Center, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard, the Koussevitzky Music Foundation at the Library of Congress, the Fires of London, the Poets’ Theatre, the Virgil Thomson Foundation, the Preparatory School of the New England Conservatory, Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble, the MacDowell Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, among others. He is currently on the faculty of Boston University and the Preparatory School of the New England Conservatory, where he teaches composition, theory, and chamber music and is co-director of the annual contemporary music festival. He is also a music tutor at Pforzheimer House, Harvard University, and is on the faculty of Greenwood Music Camp.

DANA MARSH has been appointed visiting associate professor of Early Music at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. He has been the Director of Music at Christ Church Cathedral, Indianapolis, Indiana. He was formerly Director of Chapel Music at Girton College at the University of Cambridge (UK) where he led the choir on three international tours and recorded a critically acclaimed disc. He is the only American to have worked on both sides of the Atlantic as a boy chorister, an organist and Music Director in the Anglican choral tradition. He was a boy chorister at St. Thomas Fifth Avenue in New York and at Salisbury Cathedral in England. He earned his Bachelor of Music degree at Eastman School of Music as a student of David Craighead. He earned Master’s and Doctoral degrees from the University of Oxford. As a countertenor Marsh performed and recorded as a vocal soloist with the American Bach Soloists, New York Collegium under Gustav Leonhardt, the Concert Royal, and the Academy of Ancient Music in the UK. He sang regularly with the Choir of New College, Oxford, recording 15 discs and performing in 25 international concert tours. He has conducted the London Mozart players, the Musica Angelica Baroque Orchestra of Los Angeles, and founded the early music ensemble Musica Humana Oxford.

 

 

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