“I love music,” says Bob Rowland, Shipley’s Upper School music teacher. But love probably isn’t a strong enough word.

Bob Rowland lives music. He breathes it.

If you ask him why students don’t use microphones in the Upper School musical performances, he’ll bring you over to the piano and launch into an inspired discourse on the overtones of musical notes, their consonances and dissonances, their vibrations. “When you’re in a cathedral and you hear a group of children singing, the experience verges on religious,” he says because the overtones are all there. Microphones don’t catch that. His passion for all subjects musical is infectious, and his knowledge is vast.

Rowland grew up in a musical family. They sang in church and played in a family band. “Growing up, I picked up a number of different brass instruments and the piano. And of course, at about the age of 13, I thought I was going to be a rock star—so I had to play the electric guitar.”

Thinking that a career in music would free him from the bonds of homework, Rowland accepted a scholarship to study voice at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY. “I started as a baritone and ended up a tenor.” He received a master’s in music at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, MD. While performing in the Baltimore/Washington area, he met his future wife (and Shipley Pre-K teacher), Rhonda.  They both went on to pursue further operatic training at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia.

Before Rowland accepted a six-month position teaching music at Shipley in 1989, he had been singing opera as a freelancer, lecturing about opera in adult education programs, and taking odd jobs playing music in churches and synagogues. He was never interested in a performing career. The long hours and constant travel were too much sacrifice for the couple of hours’ performance time he would get. “When you’re teaching music,” he says, “you have the ability to bring music into people’s daily lives more consistently than if you were a performer.”

And bring music into students’ lives he does. At Shipley, Rowland is a private singing coach, directs the Madriguys a cappella singing group and the jazz band, is the musical director for the spring theatrical production, teaches music theory and advanced music topics, helps with concert band, and writes the musical arrangements performed by his students. “We try to give students as much music as we can while they’re here, and we’re able to give them a lot of opportunities… It’s all exciting, it’s all fun. I’m lucky to be teaching music.”