James Huneker  

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James Gibbons Huneker (31 January 1860 - 9 February 1921) was an American-born cosmopolitan music and arts writer active during the fin de siècle.

Contents

Biography

Huneker was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He studied piano in Europe under Leopold Doutreleau and audited the Paris piano class of Frédéric Chopin's pupil Georges Mathias. He came to New York City in 1885 and remained there until his death. In the USA he studied with Franz Liszt's student Rafael Joseffy, who became his friend and mentor.

Huneker wrote the analysis and commentary on the complete works of Chopin for Schirmer's music publishing company. His analysis of all the piano solo works of Johannes Brahms, written shortly after that composer's complete works were published after his death, is highly regarded.

He was the music editor of the Musical Courier and for two years was music editor of the New York paper The Sun, and a frequent contributor to the leading magazines and reviews.

Music criticism

Huneker is mostly remembered now for his music criticism. He was a music critic who familiarized Americans with then modern European artistic movements and wrote in a highly subjective style, full of metaphorical descriptions.

Art and literature

Huneker was equally proficient in his knowledge of art and literature, and was one of the first to write of Gauguin, Ibsen, Wagner, Nietzsche, France, van Gogh, and George Moore.

American decadent movement

Huneker contributed to M'lle New York, a magazine of American Decadence founded jointly with Vance Thompson. While this was a remarkable magazine in many ways, its written content and its illustrations occasionally express the casual anti-Semitism of the period, but these could not have been written by Huneker (most likely they flowed from Thomson's pen), for Huneker was well known for espousing the opposite view, that the Jews were perhaps the most talented race in the world.

Legacy

Following Huneker's comment in reference to Chopin's Études that "Small souled men, no matter how agile their fingers, should avoid [them]," Douglas Hofstadter, in his book I Am a Strange Loop, named the unit by which "soul size" is measured the huneker (lower case).

List of works

His books include:

List of texts on Huneker

The most authoritative reference on Huneker is the 1963 biography by Arnold T. Schwab, "James Gibbons Huneker Critic of the Seven Arts" published by Stanford University.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "James Huneker" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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