Harold Stover
*26 November 1946
Works by Harold Stover
Biography
I was born in Latrobe Pennsylvania USA and presently live in Hollis Maine USA. I studied at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania USA and am a graduate of The Juilliard School in New York City. I have composed works in all forms but opera with an emphasis on keyboard, choral, vocal, and chamber music. My performing life has been as an organist and choral conductor As an organ recitalist I have given concerts in churches in New York, at Westminster Abbey in London, the National Cathedral in Washington DC, and in many other venues. I presently conduct the a capella chorus Renaissance Voices in Portland ME USA and with them have given premieres of many new works. I teach music theory, composition, and organ at the Portland Conservatory of Music. MiIestones of my career include 13 appearances as performer and composer on the American radio show Pipedreams; organ and choral works published by Augsburg-Fortress, ECS, MorningStar, and Paraclete presses, recordings on the ACA, Albany, and Gloriae Dei Cantores labels, my music the topic of a feature-length profile in music journal The Diapason.
About the music
The most prominent influences on my work are Charles Ives, Olivier Messiaen, George Gershwin, Scott Joplin, and Ralph Vaughan Williams among others. My music is post-modern 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.