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Arthur Foote (1853 – 1937) was an American classical composer. Foote was a leading member of a group of composers known as the Boston Six, the other five being John Knowles Paine, Horatio Parker, George Chadwick, Edward MacDowell, and Amy Beach. Together, they composed the first substantial body of indigenous "classical" music in America. Foote was known for chamber music, art songs, and music for choirs and was considered the "Dean of American Composers" during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

At Harvard, Arthur Foote studied composition and music history under John Knowles Paine. In 1875, a year after graduation, Foote earned the first master’s degree in music ever granted by an American university. In 1876 he began to appear as a piano recitalist and began working as a church organist in 1876 at the Church of the Disciples in Boston, a "free church" founded by the prominent Unitarian minister, James Freeman Clarke. Two years later he was engaged as organist and choirmaster by First Church, Unitarian, in Boston, a post he held for thirty-two years.

The music for which Foote is best remembered today is exclusively instrumental. In his own time the Four Character Pieces after the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was his most popular orchestral work. His works most often programmed by orchestras since that time are the Night Piece for Flute and Strings and the Suite in E major.

The modern tendency is to view Foote’s music as “Romantic” and “European” in light of the later generation of American composers such as Aaron Copland, Roy Harris and William Schuman, all of whom helped to develop a recognizably American sound in classical music. In some sense, then, he is to music what American poets were to literature before Walt Whitman.

Foote was an early advocate of Brahms and Wagner and promoted performances of their music. Foote was an active music teacher and wrote a number of pedagogical works, including Modern Harmony in Its Theory and Practice (1905), written with Walter R. Spalding. It was republished as Harmony (1969). He also wrote Some Practical Things in Piano-Playing (1909) and Modulation and Related Harmonic Questions (1919). He contributed many articles to music journals, including "Then and Now, Thirty Years of Musical Advance in America" in Etude (1913) and "A Bostonian Remembers" in Musical Quarterly (1937).

The Grove Music Encylopedia says:

“In his finest works Foote was a memorable composer. His style, firmly placed in the Romantic tradition, is characterized by lyrical melodies, expressive phrasing, and clear formal structure. He excelled in writing for strings and achieved particular popularity in his lifetime with the Suite in E major op.63 and A Night Piece for flute and strings. Of his works for full orchestra, the Four Character Pieces after the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám op.48 is noteworthy for its colourful instrumental writing…”. ^[1]

There exists a full-length biography by Nicholas E. Tawa: Arthur Foote: A Musician in the Frame of Time and Place (1997).

notes and references

External links

• Arthur Foote Piano Quintet in a minor, Op.38 with short biography & soundbites
• Arthur Foote String Quartet No.1 Sound-bites and information about composition.