Arthur Williams Foote

Foote, Arthur William (5 Mar. 1853-8 Apr. 1937), composer, was born in Salem, Massachusetts, the sixth child and youngest son of Caleb Foote, the editor of the Salem Gazette, and Mary Wilder White. His mother died four years after his birth, and he was reared by his older sister, Mary White Foote Tileston. His only other surviving sibling, his brother, Henry Wilder Foote, was a long-time minister of King's Chapel, Boston.

At age twelve Foote began piano studies in Salem with Fanny Paine, a student of Benjamin J. Lang; two years later he took a harmony class with Stephen Emery at the New England Conservatory of Music. Following his maternal grandfather's example, he entered Harvard College in 1870. He was director of the Harvard Glee Club for two years and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1874. His studies of counterpoint and fugue with John Knowles Paine continued into graduate school; at the same time he studied piano and organ with Lang. In 1875 Harvard granted Foote the first M.A. in music to be given by an American university. He was also the first American composer to receive his entire musical training in the United States; his only other formal instruction was a few lessons with Stephen Heller in France in 1883. Foote made eight summer trips to Europe over a twenty-year period, where he met many of the leading musicians of the day and attended the first Bayreuth Festival and the premiere of the complete Ring des Nibelungen. In 1880 he married Kate Grant Knowlton; they had one daughter.

A resident of Boston all his professional life, Foote had a long and active career as a teacher, church organist, and piano recitalist. Beginning in 1875 he taught piano and organ in his private studio; from 1921 until his death he also taught at the New England Conservatory of Music. In 1876 he became organist at the Church of the Disciples in Boston; two years later he was appointed organist and choirmaster of the First Church (Unitarian), a post he held until 1910. Foote made his piano recital debut in 1876 and continued performing regularly until 1895. In 1880 he instituted a series of chamber music concerts in Boston that featured not only new music from Europe but his own works and those of his American contemporaries; the series continued until 1895. Foote frequently played with the Kneisel Quartet and conducted the Boston Symphony and other orchestras in performances of his own compositions.

Foote began composing as a child, but his first extant composition dates from 1877, a gavotte for piano that was performed in Boston that same year by Annette Essipoff on the first all-American program in the United States. The first of Foote's works to be published, it came out in 1882 in the set Trois morceaux de piano, op. 3, under the imprint of the Boston publisher Arthur P. Schmidt. Virtually all of Foote's output was handled by Schmidt, whose international connections assured a ready market and numerous performance opportunities for Foote's compositions in Europe.

Foote wrote over two hundred compositions, primarily for voice, piano, organ, strings, or orchestra. A prolific songwriter, his strong melodic gift is best exemplified in "I'm Wearing Awa' " (1887) and "An Irish Folk Song" (1891), which has been published in many editions in the United States and abroad. In addition to numerous anthems and choruses for men's and women's voices, he wrote four cantatas for voices and orchestra. Although he composed many works for piano, Foote excelled in writing for strings, and much of his chamber music has been recorded. His first orchestral piece, the overture In the Mountains, op. 14 (1886), was performed at the Paris Exposition of 1889. Several works, including the Piano Quartet, op. 23 (1890), and the Serenade for Strings, op. 25 (1891), were featured at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. His Suite in E major, op. 63, for string orchestra (1907-1908), is probably his most frequently performed work. Most of his symphonic works were premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra; the Cello Concerto, op. 33 (1893), and the Four Character Pieces after the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, op. 48 (1907), which Foote considered to be his most successful work for orchestra, were premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. His last major work, A Night Piece, for flute and strings (1922), is his most famous.

The first American-born and -trained composer to achieve international recognition, Foote was one of the leading composers in Boston at the turn of the century. Grouped with Amy Beach, George Chadwick, Edward MacDowell, Horatio Parker, and John Knowles Paine as a member of the Boston Six or the Second New England School, he was strongly influenced by the predominant Germanic presence in the Boston musical scene during the second half of the nineteenth century. Firmly rooted in the romantic tradition, Foote's music is characterized by lyrical melodies, expressive phrasing, clear formal structure, colorful orchestration, and impassioned feeling.

Highly regarded as a pedagogue, Foote wrote numerous didactic articles for musical journals and two handbooks on modulation and piano playing. He translated Ernst F. E. Richter's A Treatise on Fugue (1878), edited Stephen A. Emery's Elements of Harmony (1924), and coauthored, with Walter R. Spalding, Modern Harmony in Its Theory and Practice (1905), which was for many years a popular theory text. Foote was dedicated to high standards and good repertoire, and he arranged and edited over one hundred piano pieces that introduced scores of students to the music of the classics. During the summer of 1911 Foote served as acting chairman of the music department and guest lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, his only formal academic appointment.

Foote was an active member of the Harvard Musical Association, a life member of the Music Teachers' National Association, one of the founders and the national president (1909-1912) of the American Guild of Organists, and an honorary member of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia. He was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and held honorary doctorates from Trinity College (1919) and Dartmouth College (1925).

Foote's editions of classical piano pieces and his theoretical writings probably had more influence on later generations than did his music, which, though solid and well crafted, was dependent on European traditions. His distinctive role was as a leader in establishing serious composition as a component of American musical life.

Bibliography

The primary collections of Foote's musical manuscripts are in the Harvard Musical Association Library, the New England Conservatory of Music Library, and the Arthur P. Schmidt Company Archives in the Music Division of the Library of Congress. Personal scrapbooks are in the Music Department of the Boston Public Library, the Widener Library at Harvard University, the New England Conservatory of Music Library, and the Music Division of the Library of Congress. The major biographical source is Arthur Foote, 1853-1937: An Autobiography, privately printed in 1946 and reprinted with introduction and notes by Wilma Reid Cipolla (1979). A complete bibliography of his compositions and writings, along with a discography and listings of the secondary literature, is Cipolla's A Catalog of the Works of Arthur Foote, 1853-1937 (1980). Analyses of his works are found in three unpublished dissertations: "Arthur Foote: American Composer and Theorist" by Frederick Kopp (Univ. of Rochester, 1957), Doric Alviani, "The Choral Church Music of Arthur William Foote" (Union Theological Seminary, 1962), and Douglas Moore, "The Cello Music of Arthur Foote, 1853-1937" (Catholic Univ., 1977). An obituary is in the New York Times, 10 Apr. 1937.

Wilma Reid Cipolla

Online Resources

Arthur Foote in the "Music for the Nation" Collection

http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/mussm:@OR(@field(AUTHOR+@band(Foote,+Arthur+))+@field(OTHER+@band(Foote,+Arthur+)))

From the Library of Congress's American Memory website. An index to twelve viewable scores.

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Wilma Reid Cipolla. "Foote, Arthur William";

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American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.

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