of motets, organ preludes, string
quartettes, concert pieces for violin, 'cello, piano, and the like, all
contributing to the furtherance of an august fame.

_Dudley Buck._

Music follows the laws of supply and demand just as the other
necessities of life do. But before a demand could exist for it in its
more austere and unadulterated forms, the general taste for it must be
improved. For this purpose the offices of skilful compromisers were
required, composers who could at the same time please the popular
taste and teach it discrimination. Among these invaluable workers, a
high place belongs, in point both of priority and achievement, to
Dudley Buck. He has been a powerful agent, or reagent, in converting
the stagnant ferment into a live and wholesome ebullition, or as the
old Greek evolutionists would say, starting the first progress in the
primeval ooze of American Philistinism.

A more thoroughly New England ancestry it would be hard to find. The
founder of the family came over from England soon after the
_Mayflower_ landed. Buck was named after Governor Dudley of the
Plymouth Colony. He was born at Hartford, March 10, 1839. His father
was a prosperous shipping merchant, one of whose boats, during the
Civil War, towed the _Monitor_ from New York to Fortress Monroe on the
momentous voyage that destroyed the _Merrimac's_ usefulness.

Buck, though intended for commercial life, borrowed a work on
thorough-bass and a flute and proceeded to try the wings of his muse.
A melodeon supplanted the flute, and when he was sixteen he attained
the glory of a piano, a rare possession in those times. (Would that it
were rarer now!) He took a few lessons and played a church-organ for a
salary,--a small thing, but his own.

After reaching the junior year in Trinity College, he prevailed upon
his parents to surrender him to music, an almost scandalous career in
the New England mind of that day, still unbleached of its Blue Laws.

At the age of nineteen he went to Leipzig and entered the Conservatory
there, studying composition under Hauptmann and E.F. Richter,
orchestration under Rietz, and the piano under Moscheles and Plaidy.
Later he went to Dresden and studied the organ with Schneider.

After three years in Germany, he studied for a year in Paris, and came
home, settling down in Hartford as church-organist and teacher. He
began a series of organ-concert tours lasting fifteen years. He played
in almost every important city