Theodore Presser was an American music publisher, philanthropist, and editor.
Background
He was born on July 3, 1848 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of Christian Presser, a German emigrant from the Saar Valley in Rhenish Prussia, who came to the United States in 1820, and his wife, Caroline Dietz of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Education
He rented a piano from store of Charles C. Mellor and took lessons, later continuing them at Mount Union College, Alliance, Ohio. Later he took courses in the New England Conservatory of Music, in Boston, where he studied with Stephen Albert Emery, Benjamin Johnson Lang, and George Elbridge Whiting. In 1878, like many other American students and teachers, he went to Leipzig to complete his musical education. There he studied from 1878 to 1880, under Salomon Jadassohn, Karl H. C. Reinecke, and Bruno Zwintscher.
Career
In the last years of the Civil War the boy worked in a foundry where cannonballs were cast for the Union armies, but the hard manual labor proved too much for his youthful strength, and in 1864 he entered the retail music and piano store of Charles C. Mellor of Pittsburgh as a clerk.
He established himself as a teacher of piano. He taught piano at the Ohio Northern University, Ada, Ohio, from 1869 to 1871; at Smith College and at Xenia Conservatory, in Xenia, Ohio, 1872-75, and at the Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio.
On his return to the United States after studies, Presser went to Hollins College, Hollins, Virginia, as professor of music, a position he held from 1880 to 1883. In 1883 with a capital of two hundred and fifty dollars he founded the Étude, a monthly musical journal, in Lynchburg, Virginia. The magazine and its owner removed to Philadelphia in 1884. Beginning as a teachers' journal, with simple articles on applied pedagogy and a supplement of studies and "pieces, " it rose from a circulation of 5, 000 copies a few years after its launching to one of over 250, 000 copies at the time of Presser's death.
Not long after the foundation of the Étude, Presser established in Philadelphia The Theodore Presser Company, a publishing house for music and books about music. In 1891 Presser resigned the editorship of the Étude in order to devote more time to his publishing and philanthropic activities.
In 1907 he established the Presser Home for Retired Music Teachers, which was later permanently located in Germantown in a handsome building with accommodations for sixty-five inmates. In 1916 the Presser Foundation was established for the consolidation and administration of various private philanthropies which the founder was conducting at the time.
Presser wrote First Steps in Pianoforte Study (1900), School for the Pianoforte (3 vols. , 1916), and Polyphonic Piano Playing (1921), and a number of piano studies and pieces of a routine nature. He was a founder of the National Music Teacher's Association in 1876.
He died of heart failure, following an operation in the Samaritan Hospital, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Achievements
Views
In the formation of his policies he was an independent, who dealt with prices and terms as suited him best - a trait which did not tend to make him popular with his competitors.
Membership
He was a honorary member of the Philadelphia Music Teacher's Association.
Connections
He married, in 1890, Helen Louise, daughter of John Curran of Philadelphia, and three years after her death in 1905, married Elise, the daughter of Russell Houston of that city.