Arthur Batelle Whiting was an American teacher, pianist, composer, and writer on music.
Background
Arthur Batelle Whiting was born on June 20, 1861 in Cambridge, Massachussets, the oldest child of Charles Edward and Emma Reeves (Leland) Whiting. His father, a descendant of Nathaniel Whiting, who emigrated from England to Massachusetts in 1638, was for forty years an instructor in the Boston public school music system and published several song collections and music textbooks. The boy's uncle, George E. Whiting, was a well-known organist and composer.
Education
Arthur Whiting's home and public-school training in music was followed by private study in Boston with William Hall Sherwood on piano and George W. Chadwick in composition, and later (1883 - 85) in Munich with Josef Rheinberger (composition) and Ludwig Abel (conducting).
Career
Whiting returned in 1885 to begin his career in Boston, but after 1895 he spent most of each year until his death in New York City, playing (frequently with the Kneisel String Quartet and other chamber groups), teaching privately, writing occasional articles, and composing. For about twenty years, beginning in 1907, he carried on the activity for which he was best known to his contemporaries: his "University Concerts" at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and other eastern colleges and universities, each school presenting him annually in a series of five lecture recitals devoted primarily to chamber music. Like many another highly cultivated musician of his day, Whiting had spent no time earning academic degrees, but these pioneer and extremely successful ventures in "music appreciation" helped to win him honorary degrees at Yale (1917), Hamilton (1929), and Princeton (1930). On June 7, 1889, Whiting had married Grace Kneeland Gorham, the daughter of a Boston merchant. He died, a widower and without children, at Beverly, Massachussets, as a result of cardiovascular ailments, and his remains were interred at the Forest Hills Crematorium in Boston. Whiting's artistic spirit was as restrained, as devoid of dramatic conflict and open sentiment, as his worldly life was uneventful. At a time when post-Wagnerian musical excesses were the order of the day, Whiting championed Brahms in his playing and in his teaching, and his own music reflected something of the reserve and intellectuality that many then saw in Brahms as contrasted with Wagner. Overshadowed by his greater contemporary Edward MacDowell, and even by such other members of the "New England school" as Chadwick, Horatio Parker, and Arthur Foote, Whiting never enjoyed more than a succès d'estime among the cognoscenti, and that chiefly during the two decades before the first World War. His most admired work was his Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra (1897), in which even Hale found a certain warmth and a refreshing originality. Piano pieces, chamber works, and church anthems are Whiting's most numerous legacy, although his first and his last important compositions - the Concert Overture of 1885 and The Golden Cage, A Dance Pageant of 1926 - are for orchestra. It was in keeping with his classic ideals that he became one of the earliest followers of Arnold Dolmetsch in the revival of the clavichord and harpsichord; the latter, especially, he used in numerous recitals beginning in 1911. He did, however, show a mildly post-classical interest in the use of the piano pedals as coloristic devices, and he devoted the second of his two volumes of Pianoforte Pedal Studies (1904, 1912) to this subject.
Personality
A composer in the classic spirit, extremely economical in his use of musical resources, Whiting was also a man of unusually high musical ideals, fastidious and severe in his judgments. He had, moreover, a barbed wit that was irrepressible but not always gentle ("a pretty knack for sarcasm, " Hale called it). But as a composer he was even more exacting with himself. The result was that Whiting composed relatively little, and what he did compose had no wide popular appeal.
Quotes from others about the person
The Boston critic Philip Hale described Whiting's piano playing as "singularly clean and elastic" but felt that his compositions lacked humanity - "perhaps he never went so far as to petition for an injunction against sex in music; but rigorous intellectuality was his one aim. "