George Frederick Bristow Katherine Preston

As a character type, the hard-working composer-conductor George Frederick Bristow seems comfortably familiar, the sort of mover and shaker for whom the concept ‘Music Makes a City’ (to borrow a phrase) was a matter of faith. (Young men, he thought, wasted their leisure on ‘frivolous nonsense, such as billiard playing’. Instead, ‘everybody should learn music either to play upon an instrument, or sing’.) Born into the trade and named after one of its immortals, he learned largely by doing: with his violin in the orchestra pit and on the concert stage, at the piano wherever and whenever the need arose, and in the organ loft on Sundays. He gave music lessons to lucrative ends, sold pianos, and wrote and published an armful of sheet music and the occasional method book. At the podium he stood before choral unions, opera and oratorio companies, and the best orchestras. He taught public school,...

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