Stan Eby is the president of Valor Summer Conservatory which previously operated in Whitewater, WI. He is now endeavoring to establish a full-time conservatory named Valor Conservatory. For more information, please visit the website.
C. Stanley Eby was born in Kaimosi, Kenya East Africa. An early love for music was instilled by his mother who brought her musical talent and classical recordings to where Eby would spend his first four years living on the remote outskirts of the Kakamega forest in western Kenya. After coming to America, with the tutelage of his mother and guidance from his older sister, he gave his first public performance of a classical solo at the age of five.
During the “soprano” years he studied piano, violin and trumpet. About the time the baritone voice emerged, he added trombone and euphonium. “If I wasn’t whistling, I was humming or tapping on something,” Eby relates. “For me the choice of music as a profession was fairly axiomatic. I suppose I always knew in the final analysis it would be music.”
He considers himself to be fortunate to have been guided during his undergraduate years by the healthy pedagogy and free technique of his beloved teacher, Dr. Gail Gingery, who is a protégé of David Blair McClosky.
Eby has a D.M.A. in voice performance from Boston University where he studied with two legends: Robert Gartside and Phyllis Curtin. For 14 years he has been on the voice faculty at Bob Jones University (BJU) where he teaches undergraduate and graduate voice, Vocal Pedagogy I and Advanced Methods of Vocal Technique. In December 2006, Dr. Eby created the title role in Simeon, a new Christmas opera composed by Dr. Dwight Gustafson (listed by Opera America). For ten years he conducted the BJU Chamber String Orchestra and in March, 2012 he conducted his fourth major opera production, Il Trovatore, at BJU. For a review of the production, click here.
Happily married for 34 years, he has three children, a son-in-law, a daughter-in-law and two beautiful grandchildren. Eby reveals with pride, “When I look at my family, I realize I am the richest man in the world.”