Mr. Samuel Rowe is the Director of Music at the Basilica of the Assumption in Baltimore. At the Basilica, he directs the Basilica Schola Cantorum (an octet of professional singers) in more than 70 liturgies and performances annually and plays on the Basilica’s historic Roosevelt organ. He has also served as an Assisting Organist at the Basilica of the National Shrine of Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC. Before relocating to Baltimore, Mr. Rowe was an active freelance keyboardist and conductor in the New York City/Northern New Jersey area, where he accompanied and directed several choirs throughout the region, and, as a ballet pianist, served for three years as a staff accompanist for the Cecchetti International Summer School in Holland, MI. He was the pianist for the Newark Boys Chorus in Newark, NJ, from 2017 to 2019, a group with whom he performed across the country and internationally on a concert tour of Argentina and Chile in the Spring of 2019. Mr. Rowe was recently one of eight composition fellows selected for the Catholic Sacred Music Project's inaugural Composition Institute, led by Sir James MacMillan in Alexandria, VA, in May of 2023. Mr. Rowe received his Bachelor of Music degree in organ performance from Rutgers University in New Jersey (where he studied with Renée Anne Louprette) in 2016 and his Master of Music degree in Choral Conducting at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., (where he studied with Timothy McDonnell) in 2021. He lives in Baltimore with his wife and four children.