An orchestral score that has been published is the Dedication March for Carnegie Hall in Pittsburg. It begins with a long fanfare of horns heard behind the scenes. Suddenly enters a jubilant theme beginning with Andrew Carnegie's initials, a worthy tribute to one to whom American music owes much.
Musicians are not, as a class, prone to a various erudition (a compliment fully returned by the learned in other directions, who are almost always profoundly ignorant of the actual art of music). One of the rule-proving exceptions is Charles Crozat Converse, who has delved into many philosophies. An example of his versatility of interest is his coining of the word "thon" (a useful substitute for the ubiquitous awkwardness of "he or she" and "his or her"), which has been adopted by the Standard Dictionary.
Converse' ancestry is American as far back as 1630. Converse was born at Warren, Mass., October 7, 1832. After being well grounded in English and the classics, he went, in 1855, to Germany. Here he studied law and philosophy, and music at the Conservatorium in Leipzig. He enjoyed the instruction of Richter, Hauptmann, Plaidy, and Haupt, and made the acquaintance of Liszt and Spohr. Spohr was especially interested in, and influential in, his work, and confident of its success.
Returning to America, he graduated from the Law Department of Albany University in 1860, with the degree of LL.B. The B has since been dignified into a D, as a tribute to his unusual accomplishments. Converse declined the honor of a Doctorship of Music from the University of Cambridge, offered him by its professor, the well-known English composer, Sterndale Bennett, in recognition of his mastery of lore as evinced in a five-voiced double fugue that ends his Psalm-Cantata on the 126th Psalm.
This scholarly work was performed under the direction of Theodore Thomas in 1888, at Chicago.
A widely known contribution to religious music is Converse' hymn, "What a Friend We Have in Jesus," which has been printed, so they say, in all the tongues of Christendom, and sold to the extent of fifty millions of copies. This tune occupied a warm place in my Sunday-schoolboy heart, along with other singable airs of the Moody and Sankey type, but as I hum it over in memory now, it tastes sweetish and thin. Its popularity is appalling, musically at least. Converse has written many other hymn-tunes, which have taken their place among ecclesiastical soporifics. Besides, he has recently compiled a collection of the world's best hymns into the "Standard Hymnal." In this field Converse, though conventional,--and conventionality may be considered inevitable here,--is mellow of harmony and sincere in sentiment.
