Earl Rivers, Knox Director of Music Emeritus, served Knox as Director of Music for 51 years, from September 1, 1974 – September 1, 2025. During his Knox tenure, he developed the Knox Choir into a highly skilled ensemble and initiated the Knox Music Series, a Knox community outreach featuring public programs of sacred choral/orchestral masterworks and organ concertos. Several of the twice annual Knox Music Series programs offered Cincinnati premieres of masterworks, to include J.S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, Berlioz’s L’enfance du Christ, and Vaughan Williams’ Hodie. Knox established the Earl Rivers Commissioning Fund in his honor to recognize and continue the Knox tradition of commissioning new works of sacred music. (Between 1995 and 2025, Knox commissioned 17 new works of sacred music.)
Earl is also Professor Emeritus of Conducting at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (CCM) where he served for 25 years as Director of Choral Studies. Over a 47-year career at CCM, he conducted staged productions of J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and St. John Passion and Honegger’s Joan of Arc at the Stake, and acclaimed regional premieres of John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls and El Niño, Tan Dun’s Water Passion after St. Matthew, Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 5 -Requiem, Bardo and Nirmanakaya, and Krzysztof Penderecki’s Credo. For 20 seasons (1998-2008), Earl was music director and conductor of Cincinnati’s Vocal Arts Ensemble, Cincinnati’s premier professional vocal ensemble. Earl has received Choral America’s Michael Korn Founders Award for Development of the Choral Art, honoring a lifetime of significant contributions to the professional choral art.
