director

Our Music Director

Introduction

Harold Stover (b. 1946) is a native of Latrobe, PA and a graduate of the Juilliard School in New York. Previously, he studied at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. His principal teachers were Vernon de Tar, John R. Lively, Robert Ivey, and Donald G. Wilkins in organ and church music, Nikolai Lopatnikoff and Carlos Surinach in music theory, composition, and orchestration, and Abraham Kaplan and Richard Strange in choral and orchestral conducting. In addition to his degree studies, he pursued independent studies at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey, and the New School for Social Research in New York City. Now retired from full-time church music work after serving churches in New York City and Portland, Maine, he directs Renaissance Voices, and is Organist and Director of Music at the Episcopal summer chapel of St. Peter’s by-the-Sea, Cape Neddick, Maine.


From 1968 to 1992 he served as Organist and Choirmaster of Second Presbyterian Church in New York City, where he directed the church’s amateur and professional choirs. He was the founder and director of the “Music at Second” concerts, which presented a wide variety of choral, instrumental, and keyboard music, including many first performances of new works. In 1986, the church’s music program was the subject of an hour-long profile on the nationally syndicated radio program IBM Salute to the Arts. During that time, he also served as Director of Music of the Alexander Robertson School, a private elementary school in New York, and was organist of the St. Andrew’s Society of the State of New York. From 1977 to 1992 he served on the faculty of the New York School of Liturgical Music, where he taught organ, choral conducting, sight singing, music theory, and church music history. In 1995 he was appointed to the faculty of the Portland Conservatory of Music, where he continues to teach organ and music theory. He has been a lecturer at regional and national conventions of the American Guild of Organists and his scholarly articles on organ and choral music, with an emphasis on American works, have been published in The American Organist, The Diapason, and other professional journals.


He served as dean of both New York City and Portland chapters of the American Guild of Organists, and was president of The Friends of the Kotzschmar Organ from 2003 till 2006. He was given the Key to the City of Portland by the mayor in 1998 in recognition of his contributions to the city’s cultural life. In 2017, the Alexander Robertson School in New York City established The Harold Stover Award in Music, granted annually to a member of graduating class.

Harold as Organist - “An unerring approach”

Harold has received national and international acclaim for his organ recitals played on both sides of the Atlantic. He has performed in most New York City recital series, at the National Cathedral in Washington, Westminster Abbey in London, St. Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh, Harvard and Princeton universities, the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, NY, Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, PA, the Methuen Memorial Music Hall in Methuen, MA, Merrill Auditorium in Portland, and many other distinguished venues. He has frequently appeared as organist in a variety of orchestral and chamber ensembles, including concerts with the New York Philharmonic. He has made thirteen appearances as organist and/or composer on Pipedreams and can be heard on Albany Records’ CD An American Album.

Allen Hughes in The New York Times called his playing “a succession of listening pleasures’ and hailed his “multiplicity of talents”. Allan Kozinn in The Portland Press Herald wrote that “textural transparency and an unerring approach to color have long been hallmarks of Stover’s style.” David Patterson in The Boston Musical Intelligencer wrote that in Harold’s Harvard recital “instrument, organist, and what was played intersected extraordinarily”, and George Bozeman Jr. in The Tracker called An American Album “a fascinating CD.”

Harold as Composer

Harold is a prolific composer whose works include keyboard music, choral and vocal music, and chamber music. They are published by Augsburg-Fortress, ECS, MorningStar, Paraclete, and Universal Edition presses and Triune have been recorded on the Albany, ACA Digital and Gloriae Dei Cantoris labels His music draws on the many musical influences, from Olivier Messiaen Charles Ives, Scott
Joplin, Ralph Vaughan Williams, J. S. Bach, George Gershwin, and William Byrd to Paul McCartney. Critics have noted his flair for instrumental color, and audiences praise his new insights into familiar forms.

Renaissance Voices programs have often featured his music, including his sacred motet This I Am, his Christmas carols The Stork and Sweet Was the Song, and his secular works springsongs on texts by E. E. Cummings and Three Shakespeare Songs.

Harold Stover in his own words

"My music is postmodern in its mixture of classical and American vernacular styles. I grew up in a rural area and my childhood was full of the same Protestant hymnody that inspired Ives. My work as an organist has drawn me to Messiaen's love of color and rhythm, some of which can be heard in the third movement of my Rag, Pastorale, and Carillon and the second movement (Moonrise) of Nocturnes Book 3. I lived and worked in New York City for 25 years and Gershwin's urban vernacular had been a powerful draw even before I found myself living in his old neighborhood."

"The ragtime revival of the 1970s opened Joplin's language to me and the concert rag is a genre to which I have returned regularly, as in the first movement of Rag, Pastorale, and Carillon. From Vaughan Williams I acquired an admiration for the visionary quality of much of his music and a love of the music of my British and Celtic roots, as in my Celtic Invocations, which seeks to capture the mystical fervor of early Celtic Christianity and the harsh but beautiful landscape of the Outer Hebrides where its ancient prayers were written. I seek to amalgamate these influences and others into a musical language which is particularly my own."

Harold Stover Reflecting on the question:

“What Renaissance Voices Means To Me:”

When I was hired to be the music director of Renaissance Voices in 2001, I had spent almost 40 years as a liturgical musician involved exclusively in sacred music and in the rapid-fire rehearsal and performance of different programs Sunday after Sunday. Renaissance Voices offered both the opportunity for the working up of concert programs over a long span of time and, in the secular spring concerts, the chance to explore an area of the choral repertoire that I barely touched since my days as a high school and college chorister. I found this, but I also found the opportunity to work with a group of people who are not just a performing group but a family whose close connection with each other comes across in their expressive performances of any repertoire that they encounter. Although there are a few members who sing professionally, all are amateurs in the truest sense - lovers of the music that they make and of each other who gather every Sunday evening, some driving for long distances, to rehearse for hours at a time when most of the world is relaxing at the close of the weekend and resting up for the work week ahead. This spirit of dedication and camaraderie enriches their music making and begins where the routines of rehearsal can go no further.

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