Search Results

(b York Co., ME, Oct 6, 1816; d Montclair, NJ, Jan 7, 1868). American composer, teacher, organist, publisher, and piano manufacturer. In 1830 his family moved to Boston, where he studied music with Sumner Hill and attended Lowell Mason’s Academy of Music; he also sang in Mason’s Bowdoin Street church choir and later became organist there. From 1836 he taught music classes and gave private piano lessons in Machias, Maine, then in 1838 became a singing-school teacher in St. John’s, New Brunswick. Bradbury moved to New York in 1840 as choir leader of the First Baptist Church, Brooklyn, and the following year he accepted a position as organist at the Baptist Tabernacle in New York. He established singing classes for children similar to those of Mason in Boston; his annual music festivals with as many as 1000 children led to the introduction of music in New York’s public schools. He also published his first collection, ...

[Joan, Joannes, Johannes]

(b Jegenye [now Leghea, nr Cluj-Napoca], March 8, 1629; d Szárhegy [now Lǎzarea, nr Gheorgheni], April 25, 1687). Transylvanian compiler of music anthologies, organist, organ builder, teacher and administrator. He studied music at the Jesuit school at Mănăştur, near Cluj-Napoca, which he left in 1641. In 1648 he was converted to Catholicism from the Orthodox faith into which he was born, and he entered the Franciscan school of the monastery at Csíksomlyó (now Şumuleu, near Miercurea-Ciuc), where on 17 November 1650 he was appointed organist and teacher. He continued his philosophical and theological studies at the Franciscan college at Trnava, near Bratislava, and he was ordained priest there on 5 September 1655. He then took up several appointments at Csíksomlyó. He had studied the organ from an early age, and worked as an organ builder and restorer in Transylvania and Moldavia. He was abbot of the monasteries at Mikháza (now Călugăreni) from ...

[Clementi, Mutius Philippus Vincentius Franciscus Xaverius]

(b Rome, Jan 23, 1752; d Evesham, Worcs., March 10, 1832). English composer, keyboard player and virtuoso, teacher, music publisher, entrepreneur, and piano manufacturer of Italian birth.

The oldest of seven children of Nicola Clementi (1720–89), a silversmith, and Magdalena (née Kaiser), Clementi began studies in music in Rome at a very early age; his teachers were Antonio Boroni (1738–92), an organist named Cordicelli, Giuseppi Santarelli (1710–90), and possibly Gaetano Carpani. In January 1766, at the age of 13, he secured the post of organist at his home church, S Lorenzo in Damaso. In that year, however, his playing attracted the attention of an English traveller, Peter Beckford (1740–1811), cousin of the novelist William Beckford (1760–1844) and nephew of William Beckford (1709–70), twice Lord Mayor of London. According to Peter Beckford’s own forthright explanation, he ‘bought Clementi of his father for seven years’, and in late ...

(b Philadelphia, PA, Aug 16, 1771; d Brooklyn, NY, Apr 30, 1861). American organist, church musician, teacher, instrument-maker, tunebook compiler, and composer. In addition to serving as the organist of Trinity Church, Peter Erben was a prominent church musician, organ builder, and music teacher in antebellum New York.

Peter was the son of Johann Adam Erben (d c1781), a Philadelphia distiller. By 1791 he was in New York working as a tanner, but turned his attention to music after a bankruptcy in 1796. He was successively the organist of Christ Church (1800), the Middle Dutch Reformed Church (1806), St. George’s Chapel (1808), St. John’s Chapel (1813), and ultimately Trinity Church (1820–39). From about 1800 he was also the founder and director of the Society for Cultivating Church Music and frequently presented public concerts with the charity children. Between ...

(b Medway, MA, Feb 27, 1784; d Brookline, MA, 1864). American composer, compiler, teacher, and organ builder. He worked from 1806 to 1820 as a music teacher in New York City, though he spent some time in Albany in 1819. In September 1820 he performed at Boston’s Columbian Museum on the Apollino, a panharmonicon that he claimed to have invented (announced in The Euterpeiad, i/23 (1820), 91). He later built reed organs and in 1836 exhibited an eight-stop instrument of his own design at Boston’s Mechanic’s Fair. He compiled The Washington Choir (Boston, 1843), a collection of temperance music that identifies him on its title-page as “pupil of Dr. G.K. Jackson,” who was active in New York between 1802 and 1812. Plimpton’s few surviving compositions include eight marches, an air, a waltz, and a minuet in The Universal Repository of Music (a collection now in the New York Public Library, which he copyrighted on ...