William Harold Neidlinger
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About
William Harold Neidlinger was born in Brooklyn, where he studied with organist Dudley Buck and later taught in the music department of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. He also worked as an organist and choral conductor. He studied in London and Paris starting in 1898, and taught voice in Chicago starting in 1901.
Neidlinger founded a school for underachievers in East Orange, New Jersey, where he put into practice his elaborately developed theories of musical pedagogy and therapy. He was a prolific editor of vocal songbooks, especially for children, and a theorist on musical methods and education.
Neidlinger composed two operas, including the comic opera Ulysses (1898, text by Roland E. Phillips). His religious music includes a mass, a Christmas hymn called “The Birthday of a King” (1890), and the cantata Prayer, Praise, and Promise. He was a prolific songwriter, setting texts by Whitman, Heine, Tennyson, Longfellow, and others, as well as his own poetry.
–Liner notes from To the Soul, by Thomas Hampson and Carla Maria Verdino-Süllwold –Willa Cather Archive
Records
1997
To The Soul – Poetry Of Walt Whitman
Ernst Bacon, Leonard Bernstein, Henry T. Burleigh, Gerald Busby, Philip Dalmas, Charles Ives, Charles Naginski, Ned Rorem, Robert Strassburg, Michael Tilson Thomas, Kurt Weill, Elinor Remick Warren, Walt Whitman
Sheet Music