Paine, John Knowles

(b Portland, ME, 9 Jan 1839; d Cambridge, MA, 25 April 1906). American composer and teacher. He was the first Amerindian to win acceptance as a composer of large-scale concert music, and one of the first to be named professor of music in an American university (Harvard).

As a youth, Paine studied organ, piano, harmony and counterpoint with Hermann Kotzschmar, a musician who had fled from Germany in 1848 and settled in Maine. After a thorough musical grounding, Paine sailed for Europe in September 1858. In Berlin he studied organ with Karl-August Haupt (who was apparently his principal mentor), and orchestration and composition with Wilhelm Wieprecht, among others. He remained abroad for three years, travelling during vacations, playing the organ and giving piano recitals in Germany and England; he met and played for Clara Schumann; and he was affected by the rediscovery of the music of Bach then current in Berlin. During this visit and also during a second, lengthy one to Germany at the end of the 1860s, Paine absorbed the style, manner and taste of the German musical world, and put it to immediate use upon his return to the USA.

When he settled in Boston in 1861, Paine started a series of organ recitals and public lectures on musical style, forms and history; these ultimately won him an appointment to the faculty of Harvard, which he retained until towards the end of his life. The department of music that he organized was to be a model for many others in American universities. Paine became the idol of the arbiter of the Boston genteel tradition in the arts, John Sullivan Dwight, whose Boston-based Journal of Music was always flattering when reporting Paine’s concerts and lectures and, more important, when lobbying for more attention to music at Harvard.

Paine was a charter member of the American Guild of Organists, and played at Harvard’s Appleton Chapel for several decades before his energies were directed towards composition and teaching. His early organ recitals were models of catholicity and included major works of Bach, not often heard in the USA at that time. Paine also lectured at the New England Conservatory, on whose board he sat as a friendly adviser; he taught at Boston University; and he appears to have had a large circle of musical friends, notably the conductor Theodore Thomas, the pianist Amy Fay, and the singer Emma Eames. Paine’s composition students at Harvard and Radcliffe included John Alden Carpenter, Frederick S. Converse, Mabel Daniels, Arthur Foote, Edward B. Hill, Daniel Gregory Mason, and Carl Ruggles; his students in music history and style included Richard Aldrich, A.T. Davison, Olin Downes, Henry T. Finck, Hugo Leichtentritt and Henry Lee Higginson. Paine advised the last-named in the founding and early development of the Boston SO. In 1898 he became a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Paine served the Harvard community for 43 years. By his presence and by his serious concern with music in a liberal arts college he awakened a regard for music among many generations of Harvard men. His writings testify to his insistence upon the place of music within the liberal arts. Performances of his compositions were treated as major cultural events in Boston and Cambridge, and attracted frequent interest in New York, Brooklyn, Chicago and Philadelphia, to judge from reviews in the major literary journals. He was commissioned to write a major commemorative composition for each of America’s expositions during his lifetime. His compositions formed a major part of the musical activities in Cambridge, most notably his music for the performance in Greek of Sophocles’ Oedipus tyrannus (at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre in 1881). Paine nourished the Harvard community with over 100 original musical compositions for use in campus plays, concerts and other diversions; with numerous lectures and prose articles; and by his presence as college organist, teacher and companion. He made Cambridge a centre of musical America and attracted such members of the Cambridge and Boston intelligentsia as H.W. Longfellow, R.W. Emerson, O.W. Holmes, J.R. Lowell, J.G. Whittier, C.W. Eliot, J. Fiske, W.D. Howells, the James brothers, F.J. Turner, C.E. Norton and G. Santayana. He was a pioneer not only in setting up a collegiate department of music, but in being a ‘composer-in-residence’, in contrast to the nature of appointments in contemporary European universities.

Paine modelled his early works upon the style of the masters he had studied, especially Bach and the Viennese classicists. The early keyboard music, the Mass in D, the First Symphony, the oratorio St Peter and the early cantatas are all in the accepted academic style prevalent before 1860 in German and German-American circles. Some of them, notably the Mass in D, go beyond mere competence to genuine inspiration and grandeur. Then, in a desire to align himself with musical progress (even after having written scathingly against the corruption of chromaticism), Paine altered his musical style by infusing it with greater chromatic activity, although never losing the strength and vigour of his individual style. A decline in health, bitterness at the lack of acceptance of his opera Azara (never staged), and the wear upon him of the academic ennui built into such a long teaching career contributed to a slackening of compositional activity in the last two decades of his life.

The change in style may be seen by comparing his two symphonies. The first, while not of uniformly superior quality, states its classical case with force and eloquence. A masterly handling of the sonata idea is notable in the opening movement and a lovely, mid-19th-century melodic slow movement. In the second symphony Paine incorporates elements of programme music, and organizes a much larger work in an almost Wagnerian manner through transformation and thematic recurrence. Another work from this period, perhaps his finest from his later years, is the Prelude to Oedipus tyrannus, which shows clear examples of thematic transformation, cyclic construction and chromatic key relationships. A more pronounced stylistic change may be seen in the two versions of the violin sonata, extensively rewritten in the last year of his life. Traditional key relationships and diatonic voice leadings in the original are replaced by chromatic mediant and semitone key relationships and non-functional chord resolutions in the later version. For the most part, these changes greatly strengthen the musical statements. Throughout his career, Paine’s music in general was characterized by a strong sense of tonality, by regular metric organization and distinctive rhythmic figuration, by sensitive orchestration and textural devices, and by controlled harmony marked by an increasing chromaticism.

Paine was rewarded in his lifetime by massive attention to his large works: the Mass in D, the oratorio St Peter, the two symphonies, some of the cantatas and music for plays. His music was performed frequently by the Boston SO and the Theodore Thomas Orchestra. In 1883 George Henschel, then the conductor of the Boston SO, was sent the following Valentine greeting:

Oh, Henschel, cease thy higher flight!
And give the public something light;
Let no more Wagner themes thy bill enhance
And give the native workers just one chance.
Don’t give the Dvorák symphony again;
If you would give us joy, oh give us Paine!

WORKS

Editions: The Complete Organ Works of J.K. Paine, ed. W. Leupold (Dayton, OH, 1975) [L] J.K. Paine: Complete Piano Music, ed. J.C. Schmidt (New York, 1984) [S]Three Centuries of American Music: a Collection of American Sacred and Secular Music (Boston, 1989–92) [T]John Knowles Paine: The Complete Organ Works, ed. W. Leupold and M.F. Somerville (Boston, 1996) [LS]

stage

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choral

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all for 1v, pf

orchestral

chamber

organ

piano

WRITINGS

ed., with T. Thomas and K.Klauser: Famous Composers and their Works (Boston, 1891, 2/1894, rev. 3/1901) [incl. ‘Beethoven as Composer’ and ‘Music in Germany’ by Paine]

The History of Music to the Death of Schubert (Boston, 1907/R)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L.C. Elson: ‘Native Music and Musicians’, Musical Herald [Boston], iii (1882)

A. Fields and R. Lamb, eds.: Letters of Celia Thaxter (Cambridge, MA, 1895)

J.L. Mathews: ‘Music in American Universities – in Harvard University – an Interview with J.K. Paine’, Music [Chicago], ix (1895–6), 644–9

G.P. Upton, ed.: Theodore Thomas: a Musical Autobiography (Chicago, 1905/R)

R.F. Thomas: Memoirs of Theodore Thomas (New York, 1911/R)

G.T. Edwards: Music and Musicians of Maine (Portland, ME, 1928/R)

W.R. Spalding: Music at Harvard: a Historical Review of Men and Events (New York, 1935/R)

A. Foote: ‘A Bostonian Remembers’, MQ, xxiii (1937), 37–44

M.A.D. Howe: ‘John Knowles Paine’, MQ, xxv (1939), 257–67

E. Fisk, ed.: The Letters of John Fiske (New York, 1940)

J.W. Barker: ‘A Report on the Society for the Preservation of the American Musical Heritage’, American Record Guide, xxxiv (1968–9), 766–74

J.A. Mussulman: Music in the Cultured Generation: a Social History of Music in America, 1870–1900 (Evanston, IL, 1971)

J.C. Schmidt: The Life and Works of John Knowles Paine (Ann Arbor, 1980)

KENNETH C. ROBERTS, JR./JOHN C. SCHMIDT