Steven Foard Darsey
Artistic Director
Steven Foard Darsey holds the Doctor of Musical Arts in Choral Conducting from the School of Music and Institute of Sacred Music at Yale. He also studied musicology and counterpoint with Peter le Huray at Cambridge and conducting with Helmuth Rilling at Stuttgart. He has conducted numerous performances and prepared choruses for Sir David Willcocks and Robert Shaw. He lectures and publishes on the history and practice of church music and his work on Georgia’s famous tunebook, The Sacred Harp, led him to establish a series of worship services with Fred Craddock based on Southern folk hymns. In August 2016, he was pleased to present a lecture for the Chautauqua Institute on the evolution of camp meeting hymnody with Timothy B. Miller.
As a composer, Darsey has written and arranged many works with publications through Lyra Sacra, Lawson-Gould, and World Library music publishers. He completed his oratorio setting of Sidney Lanier’s, “The Marshes of Glynn” in 2009. For his work on Georgia’s Ossabaw Island on this composition, he was named the Sandy West Ossabaw Fellow for 2010. In 2018 he was honored with permission from the Robert Frost Estate to publish his choral song cycle of four Frost poems.
His book, The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: Music and Worship, was published to strong critical notice. Having taught church music at Emory’s Candler School of Theology and served as Music Director for Glenn Memorial United Methodist Church, Mr. Darsey is now Artistic Director for Meridian Herald.