Speaker Series
St. John’s Speaker Series is a popular adult education offering held between services at 10:00 AM on select Sundays from September to May. Nationally noted individuals, from scholars and poets to world leaders and faith leaders, present on pressing issues of the day and impactful historical events to expand our knowledge as individuals and as a community.
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Sunday, May 10, 2026
The music of St. John’s Parishioner Mary Howe
Sunday, May 10, 2026
10:00 am
William Watson will lead a discussion about former St. John's parishioner, Mary Howe; American composer, pianist, and arts philanthropist who greatly influenced the arts in Washington, DC throughout the mid 20th century.
William Watson earned a PhD in historical musicology from Yale University, where he specialized in late medieval European love song, the history of notation and music theory, and critical computational approaches to the study of music history. His scholarly writing has appeared in such venues as the Journal of Musicology, Music Theory and Analysis, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Corpus Studies, and Early Music America. He now works as a data scientist in Washington, DC.