Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, organist and composer Alfred V. Fedak attended the Pingry School and graduated from Hope College in 1975 with degrees in Organ Performance and Music History. He subsequently earned a Masters’ degree in Organ Performance from Montclair State University and has done additional study at Westminster Choir College (church music), Eastman School of Music (harpsichord continuo), the Institute for European Studies in Vienna, Austria (music history), and in England at the first Cambridge Choral Studies Seminar at Clare College, Cambridge. His organ studies were with Prudence Curtis, Roger Davis, Roger Rietberg, and Jon Gillock. A Fellow of the American Guild of Organists, Mr. Fedak also holds the Guild’s Choirmaster Certificate, and from 1995 to 2000 served as Director of the AGO’s national Professional Certification Committee. Since 1986 he has been a member of the guild’s national Board of Examiners: his own grade of 95% on the AGO’s Fellowship paperwork remains the highest score ever achieved on that demanding, seven-hour examination since the founding of the Guild in 1896.
A widely-published and well-known composer of church music, Mr. Fedak has over 200 choral and organ works in print, and more than 100 of his hymntunes appear in hymnals and collections throughout the US, Canada, England, Scotland, New Zealand, China and Japan. Three anthologies of his hymns have been published by Selah Publishing Company: The Alfred V. Fedak Hymnary (1990), Sing to the Lord No Threadbare Song (2001), and God of the Future (2009). A review of the latter volume in The Hymn (the journal of the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada) called Fedak “the finest composer of hymn tunes working today.”
Mr. Fedak has earned many awards in organ performance and composition, including the AGO’s prestigious S. Lewis Elmer Award, as well as grants and prizes from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Hymn Society, and the John Ness Beck Foundation, and has received ASCAP composition awards annually since 2001. In 1995 he was named a Visiting Fellow in Church Music at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas. He served on the editorial committee for Sing! A New Creation, a hymnal supplement prepared jointly by the Reformed Church in America, the Christian Reformed Church, and the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, and he now serves as a member of the Presbyterian Committee on Congregational Song (the committee preparing a new hymnal for the PCUSA).
Recently called “one of the country’s leading church musicians” by The American Organist, Mr. Fedak has performed and lectured widely throughout the US, including at national and regional conferences of the AGO and the Hymn Society (of which he is a Life Member). In addition to his many solo appearances, he has performed with numerous choral and instrumental ensembles, including Albany Pro Musica, the New York Catholic Chorale, Saratoga Chamber Singers, Octavo Singers, the Schenectady Choral Society, the St. Rose Masterworks Chorale, Battenkill Chorale, Oneida Area Civic Chorale, Germany’s Harmonic Brass, Chicago’s Foster Street Brass, the Catskill Brass, the Catskill Chamber Players, the Catskill Symphony, the St. Cecilia Chamber Orchestra, and the Franciscan Chamber Orchestra. He serves as accompanist for both the Burnt Hills Oratorio Society and the Mohawk Valley Chorus, and also appears regularly in concert as harpsichordist and organist with the Capitol Chamber Artists. As a soloist or accompanist, he has performed throughout much of the US, as well as in Canada, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Russia, and Anguilla.
He has composed music on commission for numerous churches, cathedrals, schools, colleges, individuals, community choruses, and for chapters of the AGO, Choristers Guild, and the Organ Historical Society. His choral and organ works have been heard on national TV broadcasts, including The Joy of Music, and The Hour of Power, and on the syndicated radio programs Sing for Joy and Pipedreams. He has written articles and reviews for The American Organist, The Hymn, Reformed Worship, and Music and Worship. His highly-reviewed CD, Come, Creator Spirit, was released in 2008 and features nearly 80 minutes of his original organ music.
Mr. Fedak has served as organist and choir director for churches and synagogues in the East and Midwest. Since 1990 he has held the position of Minister of Music and Arts at Westminster Presbyterian Church on Capitol Hill in Albany, where he plays a recently-restored four-manual, 1929 E. M. Skinner pipe organ. He has taught organ and keyboard harmony at the College of St. Rose, is a Past Dean of the Eastern New York Chapter of the American Guild of Organists, and is Chapel Organist at Emma Willard School in Troy, New York, where he plays a 1970 two-manual tracker organ built and newly restored by Fritz Noack. He and his wife Susan are the parents of two grown sons: Peter and Benjamin.
