Richard Storrs Willis

Richard Storrs Willis (1819–1900) was an American composer, music critic, editor, and writer whose career linked church music with the developing professional music culture of nineteenth-century America. Born in Boston, he graduated from Yale College in 1841 after taking an active role in the college’s Beethoven Society, serving as its president in 1838 and 1840. He then spent about six years studying music in Germany; Yale’s archival account names Felix Mendelssohn among his teachers.

After returning to the United States, Willis worked in New York musical journalism. He served as music critic for the New York Tribune and The Albion and was associated with The Musical Times, where he was an editor for a time. He also belonged to the New-York American-Music Association. In 1862 he founded Once a Month: A Paper of Society, Belles-Lettres and Art, extending his editorial activity beyond church music into the broader literary and artistic life of the city.

Willis published Church Chorals and Choir Studies in 1850. Study No. 23 in that collection, originally set to Philip Doddridge’s “See Israel’s gentle shepherd stand,” became the starting point for the tune later known as CAROL. Willis recalled expanding the earlier study into a Christmas carol while serving as a vestryman at New York’s Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration. The expanded melody later became a leading American setting of Edmund Sears’s Christmas hymn. Willis’s work as composer, critic, editor, and participant in New York musical institutions places him within the developing culture of nineteenth-century American sacred and concert music.