Nathan H. Allen was born on April 14, 1848 at Marion, Massachussets, United States. He was the son of Henry M. Allen, a captain of packet-ships between New York and Liverpool, and Matilda E. Clark, whose ancestry ran back to Thomas Clark of Plymouth and Henry Butler Bridgman of the vicinity of Limerick, Ireland. His middle name was either "Hale" or "Henry, " as it was written in both ways without protest on his part. His regular signature was "N. H. Allen. "
Allen attended public schools in Providence and for a time studied at Phillips Andover Academy. His musical aptitude was early displayed and he aspired to become a singer. An illness affected his voice, however, and he then turned to the organ, taking lessons for two years in Providence. In 1867 he went abroad and had three years at Berlin under the famous organist Haupt, and the equally famous Grell, the conductor of the Singakademie.
In 1870 Allen became organist at the First Unitarian Church in New Bedford, Massachussets. In 1878 he removed to Hartford, Connecticut, as organist at the Park Congregational Church and from 1880 at community services at South Manchester, Connecticut. From 1883 till 1906 he held his most distinguished post as organist of the First or Center Church in Hartford. For some years thereafter he was at Piedmont Church in Worcester, Massachussets, about 1915 returning to live at Hartford.
For at least fifty years he was steadily occupied in teaching piano, organ, singing and theory, besides other activities noted below. He was invited to serve as recitalist at the Buffalo, St. Louis, and San Francisco Expositions. For a time he conducted the Musurgia Club of Hartford, a select chorus of trained voices which he organized. He was greatly interested in the choral projects of Carl Stoeckel at Norfolk, acting often as conductor for the Litchfield County Festival Chorus. For years he taught theory at Mount Holyoke College, as well as later at the Hartt School in Hartford.
In 1888 Allen and Leonard Woolsey Bacon published The Hymns of Martin Luther, in which they dealt with the musical side of the subject.
His interest in colonial history led him for years to elaborate a History of Music in a New England State, 1630-1900, pertaining chiefly to Connecticut, the manuscript being left at his death to the Watkinson Library in Hartford.
Of his compositions, vocal and instrumental, numbering perhaps 150, may be mentioned the cantatas The Apotheosis of St. Dorothy (1891) and The New-Born King (1904), a Fantasie-Impromptu and Winter Sketches for piano, a Pièce Symphonique, a Symphonic Fantasia and many shorter works for organ, In Memoriam for organ, piano, and strings, etc. , some fifty published anthems, a set of Forty Liturgical Responses (1915), and many songs. His breadth and delicacy of conception were everywhere combined with notable technical skill.
Allen, an expert and effective player, conductor and educator, won an excellent reputation, and during the period of his residence at Hartford he had made his influence a potent factor in the musical world that lies within the boundaries of the commonwealth of Connecticut. Among his many able organ pupils were R. P. Paine of Norfolk, Connecticut, and W. C. Hammond of Holyoke, Massachussets. He was a facile and even brilliant writer, contributing valuable critical and historical articles to papers and magazines. He was the founder of the American Guild of Organists.
Allen was an original member of the New York Manuscript Society.
In 1877 Allen married Elizabeth Macy, a descendant of an early settler in Nantucket.
