Skinner Chávez-Melo

Skinner Chávez-Melo was a Mexican-born American organist, conductor, composer, and advocate for Hispanic church music. Born in Mexico City, he completed higher musical and theological study in the United States, earning degrees at Eastern Nazarene College and Union Theological Seminary and undertaking further study at the Juilliard School and the Manhattan School of Music. He toured internationally as an organist and conducted orchestras in Mexico, Brazil, and the United States.

In New York he served as music director of St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church in Manhattan and conducted the annual Singing Christmas Tree concerts at South Street Seaport. His service crossed denominational boundaries: for many years he chaired the Episcopal Church's National Hispanic Music Committee, and his settings and accompaniments entered hymnals of the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, Yale University, and other publishers. He also lectured and led workshops on Hispanic church music, helping congregations and editors engage Spanish-language repertory with musical integrity.

Chávez-Melo wrote for organ, choir, and orchestra and created hymn tunes including RAQUEL and CHÁVEZ. His compositions, harmonizations, and idiomatic accompaniments made him an important late-twentieth-century Hispanic voice in North American congregational song. He died in New York in 1992, aged forty-seven, after an illness with spinal cancer.