John Knowles Paine
John Knowles Paine (1839-1906) was an American composer and organist, born in Portland, Maine, and the first professor of music at an American university, at Harvard. Trained in Germany, he wrote in the Romantic line that followed Beethoven, and the premiere of his First Symphony in 1876, followed by the Second, is often taken as the start of the American symphonic tradition. He studied with Hermann Kotzschmar in Portland and then in Berlin, where Karl August Haupt taught him organ. He joined Harvard as organist in the early 1860s and was made assistant professor of music in 1873.
Symphony No. 1 / Overture To "As You Like It"
John Knowles Paine's Symphony No. 1 is a milestone in the development of American music. It was not the first symphony written by an American (George Frederick Bristow, for many years a violinist in the New York Philharmonic, had already written seve…
Symphony No. 2
The premieres of John Knowles Paine's two symphonies－the First in 1876, the Second in 1880－may be said to mark the effective beginning of the American symphonic tradition. American composer George W. Chadwick, who had been a young man in Boston in th…