Born in Wichita, Kansas, and raised in San Francisco, it is in California where Robert Convery began his musical studies. After moving to New York City, Mr. Convery’s teachers have included David Diamond, Richard Hundley, Vincent Persichetti, and Ned Rorem. His music is expressed in a distinctly personal voice of lyricism, rhythmic vitality, a keen harmonic sense, and transparent textures.

Mr. Convery has written six operas, 31 cantatas, 12 song cycles and numerous orchestral and chamber works. Performers of his music include Glimmerglass Opera, Spoleto Festival USA, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Orchestra del Teatro Verdi di Trieste, Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, New York Festival of Song, Festival Dei Due Mondi, Musica Sacra, Singing City Choir, the Lesbian and Gay Chorus of Washington, D.C.—who commissioned his cantata Under the Greenwood Tree for its 25th anniversary—and numerous schools and choirs nationwide.

Songs of Children, a cantata on poems by children from Terezin Concentration Camp, received its Washington, D.C. premiere in 1993 for the opening of the United States Holocaust Museum. In October 2011 it will be performed in the Czech Republic to commemorate the opening of The University of Understanding, currently being constructed at the Terezin site. Mr. Convery has recently completed his 31st cantata, As Rivers Seek the Sea. He is currently writing a collection of seven song cycles.

About The Lamb:

The Lamb was written as a birthday present for organist John Walker. It was composed in November 1988 over a period of three days. I composed all of the music on the first day. I then spent the next two days refining the counterpoint of the climactic three bars of each of the two stanzas of the poem. These three bars, initially and intentionally, were jotted down in a hurry to attain the desired musical gesture needed to open up the words. The knottiness of this hurried jotting required a bit of time for refinement. The simplicity of a desired, gentle freshness in harmonic shift also received much attention after the first day of composition. The first performances of this hymn-like motet were given by two choirs in the same week of December 1988: at The Riverside Church, John Walker, music director, and at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York City, by the New York Concert Singers, Judith Clurman, music director.