Background
Sigmund was born on April 10, 1885 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of Adolph Spaeth, a Lutheran minister, and of Harriet Reynolds Krauth.
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Sigmund was born on April 10, 1885 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of Adolph Spaeth, a Lutheran minister, and of Harriet Reynolds Krauth.
One of eleven children, all of whom received a good exposure to music and played the piano, Spaeth also studied the violin. He attended Quaker schools and graduated from Germantown Academy in 1901. He also studied at the Philadelphia Music Academy (1900 - 1903).
In 1905 he graduated with a B. A. from Haverford College, from which he received an M. A. in English the following year. Between 1906 and 1910, Spaeth studied orchestral and choral music with Philip Mittell and Charles Burnham while pursuing a doctorate in English at Princeton University (where he taught German, 1906-1908). His dissertation was on "Milton's Knowledge of Music: Its Sources and Its Significance in his Works" and he received the Ph. D. in 1910.
Spaeth was concertmaster of the Princeton University Orchestra (1906 - 1910) and president of the Princeton Choral Society (1908 - 1910). From 1910 to 1912 Spaeth taught English and was director of music at the Asheville School in North Carolina. After a trip to Europe in 1912, he moved to New York City. He rented a small room that had once been O. Henry's and tried to write fiction but found the task financially unproductive and turned to editorial and journalistic endeavors.
In 1913, he worked as an assistant editor with the music publishers G. Schirmer (where he also translated songs into English from French, Italian, German, and Russian) and as music editor for the humor magazine Life. He also edited Opera Magazine.
From 1914 to 1918, Spaeth was music editor for the New York Evening Mail. He was a reporter on the sports staff of the New York Times (1919 - 1920) as well as musical correspondent for the Boston Transcript. He then became educational director and later promotion manager for the American Piano Company (Ampico) and began his career as a lecturer.
From 1928 to 1931, he was managing director of the newly formed Community Concerts Corporation, which, by grouping together certain New York managerial bureaus, hoped to hold back falling concert attendance and rising performing costs. During this time Spaeth wrote numerous articles on music, frequently stressing his analysis of, and concern for, the contemporary American music scene. He also wrote about jazz, barbershop singing, and other popular American music. During his life he published more than thirty books, including anthologies of American music and surveys of the classics and their composers.
He also began one of the first radio amateur shows. In the late 1920's, Spaeth began giving expert court testimony in major music plagiarism cases, usually speaking for the defense. He pointed out that most popular American pieces were derived from classical melodies.
His method of revealing these musical sources earned him the title "Tune Detective. "
He gave demonstrations of this skill on the vaudeville stage, often dressed like Sherlock Holmes. Spaeth was musical editor for McCall's Magazine (1931 - 1933), Esquire (1934), and Literary Digest (1937 - 1938).
In 1955, he became editor of the Music Journal, a position that he held until his death, in New York City. Spaeth was the most popular musicologist of his day.
Spaeth died in New York City, New York at the age of 80.
(Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating bac...)
(A popular introduction to the immortal symphonic music of...)
(Sheet music instruction book for beginning levels.)
He emphasized that music should have a part in everyone's life, that there was a "common sense of music" that everyone has but which people are often timid about discovering. He claimed anyone can play the piano in five minutes without a lesson.
Americans, he believed, had become musically backward. He tried to make his audiences aware of the relation between the "classics" and popular music so that they would lose their initial awe of the former. He made teaching entertaining and entertainment educational. On the lecture circuit, in his writing, and especially on the air as the Tune Detective, Spaeth tried--and largely succeeded--in his massive project of giving the entire nation lessons in music appreciation and in what might now be called musical awareness.
He emphasized that music should have a part in everyone's life, that there was a "common sense of music" that everyone has but which people are often timid about discovering.
Quotations: “Music should not be limited to people of talent, ” Dr. Sigmund Spaeth argues at this 1952 Books and Authors Luncheon.
He was a member of the of the Princeton Choral Society (1908 - 1910) and of he New York Chapter of the Society for the Preservation of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America.
He was an athletic man of imposing stature.
On January 30, 1917, he married Katharine Lane. They had no children.