Huneker, James
James Huneker, c. 1890, photo by Napoleon Sarony
James Gibbons Huneker (31 January 1860 – 9 February 1921) was an American music writer and critic.
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.
His books include:
- Mezzotints in Modern Music (1899)
- Chopin: The Man and His Music (1900)
- Melomaniacs (1902)
- Overtones (1904)
- Iconoclasts (1905)
- Visionaries (1905)
- Egoists: A Book of Supermen (1909)
- Promenades of an Impressionist (1910)
- Franz Liszt (1911)
- The Pathos of Distance (1913)
- Old Fogy (1913)
- Ivory, Apes, and Peacocks (New York, 1915)
- New Cosmopolis (1915)
- Unicorns (1917)
- Bedouins (1920)
- Steeplejack (1921)
- Variations (1921)
- Painted Veils (1930)
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.
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.
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. 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.
Following Huneker's comment in reference to Chopin's Études that "Small souled men, no matter how agile their fingers, should avoid [them],"[1] Douglas Hofstadter, in his book I Am a Strange Loop, named the unit by which "soul size" is measured the huneker (lower case).[2]
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| Persondata |
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Huneker, James |
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| Date of birth |
1857 |
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| Date of death |
1921 |
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