In the world of concert music, January 9th was a quiet day. The most noteworthy event to fall on this date was the birth – in 1839 and in Portland, Maine – of the American composer and pedant John Knowles Paine. In 1874, at the age of 35, Paine became not just the first Professor of Music at Harvard University, but the first academic professor of music at any American university. It was a position he held until 1905; he died in 1906 at the age of 67. Let us give Professor Paine his due up front: he was, in his maturity, an extremely skilled compositional craftsperson. Having trained in Berlin, he came home to the United States and spent his career composing concert works that are stylistically indistinguishable from his German models (except for the fact that they are not – artistically – as good as his German models; too bad). In this imitation-of-musical-things-German Paine was the poster-child for pretty much every mid-to-late nineteenth century American composer (excepting the young Charles Ives), all of who spent their compositional careers trying (unsuccessfully) to “be like Brahms”. (In reference to Paine’s music, this “be-like-Brahms” thing is ironic, because despite the fact […]