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. He has conducted numerous performances and has 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, has led him to establish a series of worship services with Fred Craddock based on Southern Folk Hymns.

Mr. Darsey also performs as a balladeer, specializing in Celtic and American folk music.  A composer, he has written and arranged over 100 works with publications through Lyra Sacra, Lawson-Gould and World Library music publishers. The summer of 2009, he completed his oratorio setting of Sidney Lanier's, "The Marshes of Glynn." For his work on Georgia’s Ossabaw Island on this composition, he was named the Sandy West Ossabaw Fellow for 2010 Mr. Darsey founded and runs Orpheus Dei and is President of Meridian Herald. Since 1986, Mr. Darsey has been Music Director of the Glenn Memorial United Methodist Church on the Emory University Campus, Atlanta, Georgia.

MERIDIAN HERALD