(Photo courtesy of Robert Beckhardt)

Since the 100th Anniversary Celebration of the dedication of the Sanctuary here at St. George's, Mary Elizabeth Nordstrom has been at the two-manual Allen organ. The following Sunday she had accepted the position of Music Director/Organist. Her familiarity with the Episcopal liturgy was developed when she was organist/choir and glee club director at The Holderness School in Plymouth, New Hampshire for four years prior to moving to North Carolina.

She joined the American Guild of Organists www.agohq.org in 1966 while at Holderness. She continued to fill short term or interim and substitute positions in various places that her husband worked. She served as Sub-Dean of the Winston-Salem Chapter, American Guild of Organists, and Dean of the Sandhills Chapter AGO. In her youth, she studied organ independently with Gladys Lydston, a conservatory organ instructor, who lived in her home town of Bristol, NH. She majored in organ briefly at Middlebury College before changing her major to Political Science.

In more recent years, following attendance at most of the 1970's Master Classes at the Summer Organ Academy of NCSA and Salem College in Winston-Salem, she studied organ at UNC-Chapel Hill for a total of two semesters with Hoyt Robinson in 1997 and Susan Moeser in 2001. Mrs. Nordstrom has been a professional organist since 1940. She had studied conducting in a class that was offered in the sixties by the New Hampshire Music Festival School.