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Don
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on Roy is currently Organist/Choir Director at Sacred Heart Church in New Smyrna Beach, Florida.
Previously, he was Music Director at Saint Joseph Catholic Church in Cold Springs, Kentucky and Organist and Choir Director for two historic downtown churches in Lexington, Kentucky:
Saint Paul's, established in 1868, and Saint Peter's, a Romanesque structure dating from the 1920s.
Earlier, Don had served at Saint Joseph Church in Melbourne, Florida, and Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton Church in Palm Coast, Florida. In both these churches he built comprehensive music programs which included concerts of major works with orchestra, adult choirs, chamber choirs, chant scholas, children's choirs and bell choirs. He also served as director of Community Choirs. In 1999 he took a 40-voice choir to Rome during the beatification of Padre Pio. The choir sang at Mass in Assisi, at Saint Peter's Basilica, and performed a concert in Rome. Don received his B.A. degree in Psychology at age 19 and his B.M. in music education one year later at Centenary College, Shreveport, Louisiana. He earned an M.Ed. degree in Special Education for the Visually Impaired from the University of Arkansas and in 1993 received his M.M. in Choral Conducting from Loyola University in New Orleans, where he studied organ with Dr. Harry McMurray and conducting with Steven Edwards. Don's interest in church music and composition dates from about 1965 when he discovered his father's old recording of the Beethoven String Trio in c minor. That chance encounter awakened an insatiable passion for good music, and the influence of a fine music director at his local church fairly assured a future in church music. Tentative steps in composition ("More ego than anything else," he writes) occurred in junior high school, but anything playable would not see the light of day until the mid-1980s. A fervor for renaissance and baroque choral music coupled with the need to produce "teaching pieces" for volunteer church choirs prompted a string of choral compositions that includes hymn concertatos, Mass settings, responsorial psalmody, music for Holy Week, anthems, organ music, and an occasional drinking round. Don writes:God didn't give me the gift of greatness. Rather, he gave me the calling to serve him "in the trenches," to show ordinary volunteers what they are capable of, to expose them to excellence one step at a time, to challenge them and rejoice in their growth, and to embrace the privilege to serve and worship our God with music.During the all-too-brief times away from his church duties, Don enjoys a wide variety of stimulating hobbies such as petting the cat, channel surfing, and balancing bowls of popcorn with the remote. We understand he also indulges in a celebratory passion for good ice cream! CanticaNOVA Publications is pleased to offer music of Don Roy in our catalogue:
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