William Arms Fisher - Composer

William Arms Fisher (1861-1948) was an American composer, arranger, music editor, publisher and historian of American music. Born in San Francisco, he was initially intended for a business career, but took his first music lessons with John P. Morgan, a prominent musician of the American West, and eventually devoted himself entirely to music. In 1890 he moved to New York to study at the National Conservatory of Music of America with Antonín Dvořák and Horatio Parker, and taught harmony there for several years before settling in Boston in 1895.

In Boston he joined the Oliver Ditson Company, where he spent most of his career as editor and publication manager, and he later served as president of both the Music Teachers National Association and the Music Publishers' National Association. He is best remembered for Goin' Home (1922), his words set to the famous cor anglais melody from the Largo of his teacher Dvořák's New World Symphony; the song became so popular that it is often mistaken for a traditional spiritual. He also published an arrangement of Seventy Negro Spirituals (1926), and composed songs and choral music, some under pseudonyms.

As a historian he wrote Notes on Music in Old Boston (1918), Ye Olde New-England Psalm-Tunes 1620-1820 (1930), The Music that Washington Knew (1931) and One Hundred and Fifty Years of Music Publishing in the United States (1934), as well as editing Sixty Irish Songs (1915). He died in Brookline, Massachusetts, on 18 December 1948. Source: Rondo DB


Usual Name	William Arms Fisher
Alternative Spellings	Wilman Wilmans, Caleb Lacy, Mario Favilli, William Arms Fisher, W. A. F., Shane O'Kelley, Robert Ashford, Heinrich Kiehl, John Carroll Randolph, Arthur B. Confield
On Wikipedia	William_Arms_Fisher
Relationships	is the pupil of Antonín Dvořák is the pupil of Horatio Parker
Links	RISM person , VIAF , GND , Wikipedia , IMSLP

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