Frederick Grant Gleason, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetFrederick Grant Gleason
American composer
Date of Birth: 17-Dec-1848
Place of Birth: Middletown, Connecticut, United States
Date of Death: 06-Dec-1903
Profession: composer
Nationality: United States
Zodiac Sign: Sagittarius 
About Frederick Grant Gleason
- Frederick Grant Gleason (born 17 December 1848 in Middletown, Connecticut - died Chicago, 6 December 1903) was an American composer, and director of the Chicago Conservatory from 1900-1903. Gleason's father was a banker.
- Like many other well-to-do gentlemen, Gleason senior was an amateur flautist.
- He considered music a pleasant pastime but not a serious occupation.
- He wanted his son to enter the ministry - a good old New England tradition.
- But the son insisted on becoming a composer, and the father yielded.
- Gleason spent much of his early life in the neighboring city of Hartford, as a pupil of Dudley Buck, going in 1869 to Leipzig to study with Ignaz Moscheles and Hans Richter.
- After six years in Europe he returned to America, and in 1877 went to Chicago as a member of the faculty of the Hershey School of Music, of which Clarence Eddy (also a pupil of Buck) was the general director.
- Gleason was also active as a music critic.
- In 1897 he became president of an organization called the 'American Patriotic Musical League'.
- He was general director of the Chicago Conservatory from 1900-1903.
- According to Philo A.
- Otis, Gleason "was an idealist, a dreamer, though too much of a follower to be a leader."Gleason's compositions include: the Festival Ode (words by Harriet Monroe) sung by 500 voices with orchestra at the opening of the Auditorium Theatre, Chicago on 9 December 1889; Processional of the Holy Grail written for the Chicago World's Fair; a symphonic Poem, Edris, based on a novel by Marie Corelli; the tone poem Song of Life (after a poem by Swinburne); a Piano Concerto; a cantata with orchestra,The Culprit Fay; and two operas: Otho Visconti and Montezuma.
- The former was produced at Chicago in 1907.
- He left other scores in manuscript, with instructions that they were not to publicly performed until fifty years after his death.
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