on his young mind has strongly
influenced his whole life-work. And, by the way, the most talented of
all the great Sebastian Bach's twenty-one children--every one a
musical opus, too--was diverted from the philosopher's career for
which he was intended, and into professional musicianship, by just
such a glee-club training in the universities at Leipzig and
Frankfort.

Almost all of Foote's compositions are written in the close harmony
and limited range of vocal music, and he very rarely sweeps the
keyboard in his piano compositions, or hunts out startling novelties
in strictly pianistic effect. He is not fond of the cloudy regions of
the upper notes, and though he may dart brilliantly skyward now and
then just to show that his wings are good for lighter air, he is soon
back again, drifting along the middle ether.

He has won his high place by faithful adherence to his own sober,
serene ideals, and by his genuine culture and seriousness. He is
thoroughly American by birth and training, though his direct English
descent accounts for his decided leaning toward the better impulses of
the English school of music. He was born at Salem, Mass., March 5,
1853, and though he played the piano a good deal as a boy, and made a
beginning in the study of composition with Emery, he did not study
seriously until he graduated from Harvard in 1874. He then took up the
higher branches of composition under the tuition of John Knowles
Paine, and obtained in 1875 the degree of A.M. in the special
department of music. He also studied the organ and the piano with B.J.
Lang at Boston, and has since made that city his home, teaching and
playing the organ.

His overture, "In the Mountains," has been much played from the
manuscript by orchestras, among them the Boston Symphony. Besides a
considerable amount of highly valuable contributions to American
chamber-music, and two fine piano suites, he has written a great many
piano pieces and songs which deserve even greater popularity than they
have won, because, while not bristling with technical difficulties,
they are yet of permanent worth.

I know of no modern composer who has come nearer to relighting the
fires that beam in the old gavottes and fugues and preludes. His two
gavottes are to me among the best since Bach. They are an example of
what it is to be academic without being only a-rattle with dry bones.
He has written a Nocturne that gets farther from being a mere
imitation of Chopin th