Arthur Foote (1853–1937) was a member of a group of composers known as the Boston Six or Second New England School of musicians. The members of the Boston Six were John Knowles Paine, Horatio Parker, George Chadwick, Edward MacDowell, Mrs. Amy Beach, and Arthur Foote. These were the first composers to write “classical” music in America.

Arthur Foote studied composition and music history at Harvard University under John Knowles Paine beginning in 1870. Foote earned the first master’s degree in music ever granted by an American university in 1875. Foote served as organist at the First Unitarian Church in Boston for several years and performed often as a pianist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Kneisel String Quartet. He later taught privately and at the New England Conservatory, and was active in the Music Teachers National Association and the American Guild of Organists, of which he was a founding member.

Foote and Kate Grant Knowlton were married in 1880. Their one daughter, Katharine Foote Raffy, was responsible for talking her father into writing his autobiography late in life. Foote died in Boston and is buried in Mt. Auburn Cemetery.

The Night Piece for Flute and Strings is the most frequently recorded of Foote’s works, often performed in its alternative chamber form, Nocturne and Scherzo for flute and string quartet. Other works that are, or have been available as recordings are the Suite in E major, the Symphonic Prologue Francesca da Rimini, three string quartets, two piano trios, a piano quartet, a piano quintet, a violin sonata, a cello sonata, short pieces for violin and piano, chamber works with flute, Five Poems after Omar Khayyam for piano, two songs, and a number of short organ works.

The only full-length biography of Arthur Foote is by Nicholas E. Tawa, Arthur Foote: A Musician in the Frame of Time and Place (1997). Foote’s An Autobiography was published posthumously in 1946, and reissued in 1979 with an introduction and notes by Wilma Reid Cipolla. Cipolla also wrote A Catalog of the Works of Arthur Foote (1980) and the Foote entry in American National Biography. John Tasker Howard, Our American Music (1929, revised 1954) contains a short biography and an appreciation of Foote from the point of view of the early 20th century. Other short biographical essays can be found in the compact disc booklets of recordings devoted to him and in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

(Contribution by Ron Mitchell <rcmitchell@bellsouth.net>.)