Besides these, there are a number 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 and in many small towns, popularizing the best music by that happy fervor of interpretation which alone is needed to bring classical compositions home to the public heart. In 1869 he was called to the "mother-church" of Chicago. In the Chicago fire he lost many valuable manuscripts, including a concert overture on Drake's exquisite poem, "The Culprit Fay," which must be especially regretted. He moved his family to Boston, assuming in ten days the position of organist at St. Paul's; and later he accepted charge of "the great organ" at Music Hall,—that organ of which Artemus Ward wrote so deliciously.
In 1875 Theodore Thomas, whose orchestra had performed many of Buck's compositions, invited him to become his assistant conductor at the Cincinnati Music Festival and at the last series of concerts at the Central Park Garden in New York. Buck accepted and made his home in Brooklyn, where he has since remained as organist of the Holy Trinity Church, and conductor of the Apollo Club, which he founded and brought to a high state of efficiency, writing for it many of his numerous compositions for male voices.
Buck's close association with church work has naturally led him chiefly into sacred music, and in this class of composition he is by many authorities accorded the very highest place among American composers. He has also written many organ solos, sonatas, marches, a pastorale, a rondo caprice, and many concert transcriptions, as well as a group of études for pedal phrasing, and several important treatises on various musical topics. His two "Motett Collections" were a refreshing relief and inspiration to church choirs thirsty for religious Protestant music of some depth and warmth.