John Knowles Paine was the first American-born composer to achieve fame for large-scale orchestral music. The senior member of a group of composers collectively known as the Boston Six, Paine was one of those responsible for the first significant body of concert music by composers from the United States. The Boston Six’s other five members were Amy Beach, Arthur Foote, Edward MacDowell, George Chadwick, and Horatio Parker.
Theodore Thomas once remarked that he thought the prestige of Boston as a musical city during the last twentyfive years was largely due to the influence of Harvard University. It is not probable that he meant the direct educational influence, since Harvard has at no time encouraged the study of ” applied ” music or influenced her students to become professional musicians by offering technical training in singing or the playing of musical instruments. Rather is it to be inferred that he had in mind the refining influence of the fine arts, and that broad, general culture which Harvard offers in such large measure, and of which it is so easy for the citizens of Boston to take advantage.
Nevertheless, Harvard was the first University in America to add music to its curriculum as a serious study For many years an orchestral society of undergraduates, known as the Pierian Sodality, had flourished in the college, and out of this grew later, in Boston, the Harvard Musical Association. This society, originally organized largely of Harvard graduates, kept orchestral music alive in Boston for more than fifteen years; in fact, from 1865 until 1881, when the Boston Symphony Orchestra was founded. From this time its activity as a concert-giving organization practically ceased, but it still exists and flourishes as a social organization, numbering among its members most of. the musical Harvard alumni as well as the principal professional musicians who live in Boston, and its fine library is a power for good.
It was largely through the influence of this Association that John K. Paine was appointed instructor in music at Harvard in 1862. Later, in 1875, the department was organized with him at its head as full professor. He had acquired a good education in Germany under Haupt and Wieprecht, and his Mass for chorus and orchestra had been performed with success in Berlin. His duties at Harvard allowed him time to give some organ concerts and historical lectures outside of the University. His oratorio, St. Peter was performed in Portland, his native town, in 1873, and extracts from it had been given at the Peace Jubilee of 1869; but it was with his first symphony in C minor that he first gained recognition as a romantic composer of high ideals and genuine imagination.
This melodious and fluent work was performed by Theodore Thomas at one of his Boston concerts in 1876 and at once attracted attention by its interesting melodic material, its masterly use of the symphonic form and its sonorous orchestration. The simple and benighted music lovers of those days had not been taught by blase critics that the sonata form was a worn-out fetich, that noble and simple melody was a relic of the dark ages, and that unresolved dissonance was the chief merit of a musical composition. It was therefore no wonder that this work, warmly endorsed by Theodore Thomas, and performed in a manner
to reveal and enhance all its beauties, should have been a stimulus and an inspiration to more than one ambitious musician of that time.
Professor Paine’s second (“Spring”) symphony in A major (see playlist above), performed in 1880, is a much more elaborate and ambitious work than that in C minor, but is hardly superior to the earlier work in genuine inspiration or spontaneous flow of ideas.
Sophocle’s tragedy, ” OEdipus Tyrannus,” with Professor Paine’s music was given at Harvard University in 1881, and afterwards in New York and Boston by a professional company. The classic dignity of the tragedy is well reflected in Professor Paine’s music, which also contains much of deeply tragic significance. His opera, “Azara,” on which he spent the last fifteen years of his life, still awaits a production. A concert performance of it by the Cecilia Society of Boston revealed many beauties of thought and much interesting instrumentation.