Harold Boatrite

Who is Harold Boatrite?

Harold Boatrite is an American composer.

After early studies with Stanley Hollingsworth, Harold Boatrite was awarded a fellowship to the Tanglewood Music Center where he studied composition with Lukas Foss and took part in the orchestration seminars of Aaron Copland. In 1961 he was invited by Rudolf Serkin to be composer-in-residence at the Marlboro Music Festival.

He received an honorary doctorate in 1967 from the Combs College of Music and subsequently was appointed to the faculty of Haverford College, where he taught theory and composition until 1980. During that time he served on the music panel of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

In honor of his fiftieth birthday in 1982, a series of concerts devoted exclusively to his music was presented by the Pennsylvania Alliance for American Music. Among the participants in the series were the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, the Thomas Jefferson University Choir and the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia. Boatrite has written in a wide variety of media ranging from solo and chamber pieces to large-scale choral and orchestral works.