Steven Foard Darsey holds the Doctor of Musical Arts in Choral Conducting from the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and has studied musicology with Peter LeHuray at Cambridge and conducting with Helmuth Rilling at Stuttgart. His conducting experience ranges from the medieval to the avant garde; he has prepared choruses for Sir David Willcocks and the late  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, has led him to establish a series of worship services with Fred Craddock based on Southern Folk Hymns.

He as written or arranged over 100 works with publications through Lyra Sacra, Lawson-Gould and World Library music publishers. His arrangements of American folk hymns and gospel songs are heard annually at Meridian Herald’s Camp Meeting, Southern Folk Advent and Passion Services. His harmonically progressive original compositions explicate scripture for contemporary worship.  The summer of 2009, he completed the orchestration of his oratorio setting of Sidney Lanier's monumental poem, "The Marshes of Glynn."

Mr. Darsey founded and runs Orpheus Dei and is President of Meridian Herald. His conducting, singing, and compositions are available on four CDs, three videos and via television broadcast. A lifetime church musician, Mr. Darsey has since 1986 been Music Director of the Glenn Memorial United Methodist Church on the Emory Campus, Atlanta, Georgia.

MERIDIAN HERALD