George W. Warren

George William Warren, the veteran organist emeritus of St. Thomas’s Church, was one of the most widely and favorably known of American composers at home and abroad. Many of his hymns are familiar throughout the land, and he was the author of a number of special compositions, during his long service at St. Thomas’s, which brought him an enviable reputation. Of New England ancestry, a direct descendant of Richard Warren of The Mayflower, and of the Lieutenant Warren who was wounded at Bunker Hill, Dr. Warren was an example of the fine product from the stern Puritan stock on which have been grafted aesthetic talent and refined taste. One intimately acquainted with his character and career writes of him in The Columbia University Quarterly:

“Years before there was in this country any intelligent appreciation of church music, or adequate facilities for the scientific study of any kind of music, George William Warren became the apostle of a movement which largely through his efforts and influence has come now to be recognized as an integral part of the instruction of a university.

“To his credit and renown it must be said that Dr. Warren, without any of the aids now easily utilized in school, college, and university, at a time when he was almost alone in the possession of his ideals of what church music ought to be, threw his heart and soul—such a heart and such a soul that we recall few like them—into a life work, the glory of which he lived to see largely in the labors of others. Truly he labored, and others entered into his labors. The world is better for both.”

Edward Cary
1903 Century Association Yearbook