French-born Georges Couvreur attended secondary school in Belgium and then earned bachelors and master’s degrees in music from Columbia University in New York. He also studied at the Conservatoires of Paris and Brussels. Primarily a composer for piano and organ, he submitted his work Hymn to Appolon, a symphonic poem, to the music competition at the 1932 Summer Olympics, although he neither medalled nor won an honorable mention. His musical adaptation of Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion played in the late 1930s at the Lafayette Theatre, which was one of the first theatres in New York City to desegregate, allowing African-American patrons to sit in the orchestra and not just the balcony. He joined the faculty of Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey in 1937 and became Director-Organist for Chatham, New Jersey’s Ogden Memorial Church in 1945. He remained in New Jersey until his death in 1957. One of his students was George Barati, an accomplished cellist, composer, and conductor.
United States