The Rhetoric of Music Harmony, Counterpoint, Musical Form (Classic Reprint)
(Library 101 PREFACE This volume is intended as a referenc...)
Library 101 PREFACE This volume is intended as a reference book for the use of students in the authors own classes in the University School of Music, University of Nebraska. It is desired to place the subjects in the hands of the student in a more convenient form than that made necessary by the wide variance in the treatment of the same facts by different authors. We hope it will prove helpful to those who come under its influence. Mortimer Wilson. University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Jan.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
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Mortimer Wilson was an American composer of classical music and conductor.
Background
Mortimer Wilson was born on August 6, 1876, in Chariton, Iowa, the son of Hess John Wilson and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Harper. The elder Wilson was himself a musician, the son of an Iowa farmer of Scotch-English extraction. Mortimer was musically inclined from his earliest years.
At the age of five he began to play the organ in a local church. On one occasion he broke open his father's violin and cornet cases, and before the parent returned for supper the lad had taught himself to play all the tunes he knew on both instruments. Then followed a collection of all the instruments of both band and orchestra. He required only one day to learn the intricacies of fingering each.
Education
Afterwards he composed many two-steps and marches for the neighborhood orchestra and some were accepted by a Chicago publisher, but before they were issued Wilson had started the study of composition, realized that his work was immature, and his father was compelled to recover the pieces through a writ of replevin.
After preliminary studies in Chariton, Wilson went to Chicago in 1894 for further instruction. He studied violin with S. E. Jacobson, organ with Wilhelm Middleschulte, and theory and composition with Frederic G. Gleason.
After four years in Chicago he entered the Culver Military Academy as a cadet, and arranged to pay for his board and tuition by organizing and directing a school band.
Career
In 1901 he went to Lincoln, Nebraska, to head the theoretical courses of the music department of the University of Nebraska, and to revive and conduct the Lincoln Symphony Orchestra. While in Nebraska he wrote two textbooks on composition, The Rhetoric of Music (1907), and Harmonic and Melodic Technical Studies (1907).
In 1908 he went to Leipzig, where for two years he studied composition with Max Reger and conducting with Hans Sitt.
In 1912 he accepted an offer to conduct the symphony orchestra of Atlanta, Georgia, and from 1913 to 1914 he acted as director of the Atlanta Conservatory of Music. From 1915 to 1916 he was associated with the Brenau Conservatory of Gainesville, Georgia, and from 1917 to 1918 with the Walkin Music School in New York City. Wilson achieved something of a reputation in the field of arranging and writing music to accompany motion pictures, and he was commissioned by Douglas Fairbanks to write original scores to accompany performances of the Thief of Bagdad and other films that preceded the day of sound pictures. As a composer Wilson acquired a technique and resourcefulness that had few equals in the country. He was definitely of the Reger tradition, with a fluency and inventiveness in counterpoint that enabled him to develop his musical ideas to the utmost. His dislike for the obvious was the principal obstacle to his success as a composer of pieces that would reach a large sale, and he remained principally a composer for musicians rather than a writer for the general public, or even for a large group of music lovers. He had many pupils in composition, and it was in this field that he was probably most distinguished.
His compositions include five symphonies, and "Country-Wedding, " a suite for orchestra (manuscript), and many published works: a trio, "From my Youth"; two sonatas for violin and piano; seven organ preludes; three suites for piano, "In Georgia, " "Suite Rustica, " and "By the Wayside"; a suite for violin and piano, "Suwannee Sketches"; "Overture 1849" (originally composed for the motion picture The Covered Wagon); "New Orleans"; an orchestral fantasy, "My Country"; and numerous short pieces and songs. He died on January 27, 1932, of pneumonia, in New York City.
Awarded $500 prize for “New Orleans” (Mardi Gras) Overture, offered by Hugo Riesenfeld, of the Rivoli and Rialto theatres, for best original American overture, October
Awarded $500 prize for “New Orleans” (Mardi Gras) Overture, offered by Hugo Riesenfeld, of the Rivoli and Rialto theatres, for best original American overture, October