Harry Rowe Shelley

Harry Rowe Shelley was an American composer, organist, and professor of music. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Shelley studied with Gustave J. Stoeckel at Yale College, Dudley Buck, Max Vogrich, and Antonín Dvořák in New York, and completed his musical education in London and Paris. According to his New York Times obituary, Shelley “penned church music that won him wide popularity. For 60 years a host of English-speaking peoples throughout the world sang his hymns.”

Adapted from the Wikipedia article on Harry Rowe Shelley.

From the period sources

Harry Rowe Shelley, born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1858, received his musical training at Yale College under Gustav J. Stoeckel, and later studied in New York with Dudley Buck, Vogrich, and Dvorak, a period of instruction that spanned seventeen years in total, according to A Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (1900). He began his career as an organist in New Haven in 1872, subsequently holding positions in Brooklyn at the Church of the Pilgrims and Plymouth Church, and in New York at the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church, where he was active in 1899 (A Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 1900). Shelley was also noted as a teacher, leading classes in theory and composition at the Metropolitan College in New York, and counting John Spencer Camp among his organ pupils, as noted in The New Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians (1924). While widely known for his sentimental songs and church music, which “hit the popular taste,” Famous Composers and Their Works (1891) suggests that his larger orchestral works were “matters of greater pride to himself.” His cantata “Vexilla Regis” was notably performed in New York in 1894 and later by the Brooklyn Oratorio Society (Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1904, and Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians: American Supplement, 1920).