Washington National Cathedral

Born in the District of Columbia, Robert Barrow (1911-1987) was graduated in 1928 from St. Albans School, where he ranked second in a class of fifteen. He had been a choir boy and a stellar organ student of Edgar Priest, serving the Church of the Ascension and St. Agnes as organist and the Cathedral as a crucifer. Barrow earned three degrees from Yale University between 1932 and 1934. In New Haven, he was organist and choirmaster at First Baptist Church, then at Trinity Church and Yale Divinity School. He won both organ playing competitions and a graduate fellowship. In 1934, as the recipient of the Ditson Fellowship for Foreign Study, he went to London where he studied conducting with Sir Henry Wood, composition with Ralph Vaughan Williams, and the English boy choir system with Dr. Ernest Bullock, Master of the Choristers at Westminster Abbey.

After Edgar Priest died in 1935, there were more than seventy applications for his position. However, the 24-year-old Barrow was seen as “one of our own” by the Cathedral’s venerable canon precentor, who recalled his protégé from England. During Barrow’s four-year tenure, he oversaw the installation of the new Ernest M. Skinner organ in the Great Choir and played the dedicatory recital in 1938, the same year he married a music teacher from nearby Mount Vernon College. The Barrows began the custom of inviting three or four choir boys at a time to have Sunday dinner with them, an invitation gratefully remembered by them all.

The late 1930’s were uncertain years of major staff changes in the Cathedral’s long-time founding-era leadership. In May 1939, Barrow accepted the offer of an assistant professorship of music at the then all-male Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he taught music history and theory, and chaired the music department (1949-1972) until his retirement in 1976. Barrow also founded the Berkshire Choral Society and in retirement, the North Carolina Chamber Singers.