F.S. Converse

Converse, Frederick Shepherd (5 Jan. 1871-8 June 1940), composer and educator, was born in Newton, Massachusetts, the son of Edmund Winchester Converse, a Boston dry goods merchant, and Charlotte Augusta Shepherd Albree. Educated in the public schools of his hometown, he entered Harvard College in 1889, where he studied with John Knowles Paine and graduated with highest honors in music in 1893. The next year he married Emma Cecile Tudor, with whom he had seven children. After a year spent working in the family business, Converse quit to pursue a career as a composer. In Boston, he assiduously studied piano with Carl Baermann and composition with George Whitefield Chadwick from 1894 to 1896. At Chadwick's urging, Converse spent two years in Munich at the Royal Academy of Music under Joseph Rheinberger. Upon completion of his course of study in 1898, Converse was honored with a performance of his Symphony in D Minor.

On his return to the United States, Converse was engaged to teach harmony at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, of which his erstwhile mentor Chadwick had just been named director. Converse was appointed instructor in 1901 and assistant professor of composition at Harvard in 1904. He resigned in 1907 and, except for holding office as vice president of the Boston Opera Company from 1911 to 1914, occasional theory and composition teaching, and service as dean at the New England Conservatory (1931-1938), he devoted the rest of his career to composition. In this endeavor he was greatly aided by income from a private inheritance. He and his family settled down on a farm estate in Westwood, Massachusetts, where he cultivated the land, raised chickens, and ran a dairy.

All of Converse's music is carefully crafted. He especially excelled in creating complex sonorities in his works composed during the first two decades of the twentieth century. His orchestral style, which is characterized by great propulsion and expressivity, has been called both modern and Romantic. Cogent examples are his Romance for Orchestra (1901); Endymion's Narrative (premiered Boston, 1903), after John Keats; and The Mystic Trumpeter (Philadelphia, 1905), a "fantasy" after Walt Whitman. The latter contains hints of a more national, less cosmopolitan locution. This tendency becomes dominant in such works of more obvious Americanism as Flivver Ten Million (Boston, 1927), a tonal paean to the Model T Ford that incorporates its distinctive raucous horn signal within the orchestral sonority. The symphonic suite American Sketches (Boston, 1935), which recollects the title and some of the native musical spirit of Chadwick's Symphonic Sketches (1908), is visually inspired rather than poetic. He applies syncopated rhythms to vernacular tunes and freely parallel chords.

Despite these modernisms, Converse rejected abstract or numerical orderings of melody or other uses of serialization. He refused to achieve novelty by the helter-skelter layering of disparate musical elements, one on top of the other, without concern for the harmony of the total effect. Essentially a musical moderate, he summed up his approach to art in 1938: "I am through with the extravagant elements of modern music. No more experimentation of that sort for me. It is already old-fashioned. What we need in our music is deeper, spiritual and emotional significance. Given that, all the rest will take care of itself."

Converse is largely remembered for his operas and vocal-orchestral works, although he composed relatively few of them. The Pipe of Desire (Boston, 1906), a pastorale in one act, won a prize of $10,000 from the Metropolitan Opera Company in 1910 and was the first opera by a native-born American to be produced at the Metropolitan Opera House. His second opera, The Sacrifice (Boston, 1911), a more stageworthy musical drama dealing with a romantic triangle during the Mexican War, shows remarkable sensitivity to the prosody of English speech. The work also contains convincing action music, passionate vocal melody, and an attempt to create the effect of conflicting ethnicities by means of orchestral color. Job, his dramatic poem for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, written for the Worcester Festival in 1907, is an example of a modern oratorio intended for the repertory of choral associations. The Latin text drawn from the Vulgate is set in one continuous movement; vocal passages are separated by expressive orchestral interludes.

Converse was honored for his musical accomplishments early in his career. He was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1908 and received the David Bispham Medal from the American Opera Society in 1925, both in response to the favorable reception of his operas. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1937. He died in Westwood. Converse was versatile and energetic, a New Englander capable of being witty and amused. His self-confidence was borne out by the fact that his music enjoyed wide favor.

Bibliography

The Converse manuscripts and papers are in the Music Division of the Library of Congress. Based on these and other materials is an admirable scholarly treatment by Robert J. Garofalo, "The Life and Works of Frederick Shepherd Converse, 1871-1940" (Ph.D. diss., Catholic Univ. of America, 1969), which includes a list of Converse's works. Lists are also in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed. (1954), and The New Grove Dictionary of American Music (1986).

Victor Fell Yellin

Citation:

Victor Fell Yellin. "Converse, Frederick Shepherd";

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American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.

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