(This is a reproduction of a classic text optimised for ki...)
This is a reproduction of a classic text optimised for kindle devices. We have endeavoured to create this version as close to the original artefact as possible. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we believe they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.
Essentials in Conducting (The Music Students Library) Fascimile
(This book is of course planned especially with the amateu...)
This book is of course planned especially with the amateur in view and the author, in writing it, has had in mind his own fruitless search for information upon the subject of conducting when he was just beginning his career as a teacher. His experience in training supervisors of music has led him to feel that although only the elementary phases of conducting can be taught such instruction is nevertheless quite worth while, and is often suprisingly effective in its results.
Oliver Ditson was an American music publisher. His company is still important in the world’s music trade.
Background
Oliver Ditson was born on October 20, 1811 at 74 Prince St. , near Copp’s Hill, Boston, Massachusetts, United States. He was descended from Hugh Ditson who settled at Billerica, Massachusetts in 1685. His father, Joseph Ditson, who married in 1797 Lucy Pierce of Lexington, became a Boston merchant and ship-owner, prosperous for a time but later dependent on Oliver, the fifth of nine children.
Education
Ditson graduated in 1823 from the Eliot School, leading his class.
Career
Ditson entered the store of Colonel Samuel H. Parker, bookseller and publisher, a founder of the Handel and Haydn Society, and later apprenticed himself to Isaac Butts, then printer of the North American Review, from whom he learned the printing trade thoroughly.
Oliver became a competent musician and for a time he was organist at the Bulfinch Street Church.
Ditson interested his first employer in his ven- turc and in 1836 the co-partnership was announced of “Parker & Ditson, dealers in Piano Fortes and Sheet Music. ” In 1840 Ditson bought out his partner, and in 1845 he took into his employ John C. Playnes, then fifteen years old, who became his efficient associate and later, under the name of Oliver Ditson & Company, adopted in 1857, his partner. His business, after the Civil War, reached $2, 000, 000 annually.
The success which Ditson achieved as a music publisher was based on sound business methods, understanding of the public capacity to appreciate music, personal sympathy with the aspirations of composers, and sufficient musical ability of his own to professionalize his commercial instincts.
As church organist and as conductor of the Malibran Glee Club he kept in close touch with his fellow musicians. He was among the subscribers who made it possible for Dr. Eben Tourjee to buy the Franklin Square House as a home for the New England Conservatory of Music.
He was quick to see a profit where others had met with a loss and made his money largely by publishing popular music at prices low enough to permit large sales. His firm owed much of its expansion to a policy of buying the plates of publishers who were in difficulty. Allied houses were established in several cities.
Oliver Ditson performed a service to musical journalism by publishing for John S. Dwight Dwight’s Journal of Music from 1858 to 1876. He was one of the guarantors who made up the deficit of $100, 000 incurred by the Peace Jubilee at Boston in 1872.
In 1888 he suffered a stroke of paralysis which ended his career after a lingering illness.