author
John Tasker Howard
1890–1964
A lively early champion of American music, he helped bring the country’s musical past to a wider audience through books, lectures, and radio. Best known for Our American Music and his work on Stephen Foster, he wrote with the aim of making music history feel close and human.
1 Audiobook
Deems Taylor
by John Tasker Howard
About the author
Born in Brooklyn in 1890, he became one of the early popular historians of music in the United States. He studied at Williams College and later with composers including Howard Brockway and Mortimer Wilson, building a career that mixed scholarship, composition, editing, and public education.
His best-known book, Our American Music (published in 1931), was an early broad history of music in the United States and helped establish his reputation as a leading interpreter of the field. He was also widely associated with research on Stephen Foster, wrote and lectured extensively, and worked in radio, bringing musical history to general audiences rather than keeping it only in academic circles.
Later in his career, he served as curator of the Music Division at the New York Public Library, and his papers show the wide range of his interests as a writer, pianist, composer, and collector of American musical history. He died in 1964, remembered as an energetic advocate for taking American music seriously.