Waldo S. Pratt

Pratt, Waldo Selden. (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, November 10, 1857--July 29, 1939, Hartford, Connecticut). Williams College, A.B. 1878, graduate study at Johns Hopkins University in classical archaeology and esthetics. He was largely self-taught in music. He was assistant director of the New York Metropolitan Museum, 1880-1882, and then joined the faculty of the Hartford Theological Seminary where he spent the rest of his life, teaching hymnology, music, public worship and allied subjects. Over the years he lectured at Trinity College, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, and the Institute of Musical Art, New York.

He was president of the Music Teachers National Association, 1906-1908, editor of its Proceedings, 1906-1915. He was awarded the honorary Mus.Doc. degree by Syracuse University in 1898, and the L.H.D. degree by Williams College in 1929. A distinguished lexicographer, he contributed to several encyclopedias, edited the American Supplement to Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1935, and compiled his own New Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians, 1924. Among other books, he wrote an outstanding History of Music, 1907, 1927 & 1935. As music historian he wrote many article in music and church journals.

In the field of hymnology, he published The Music of the Pilgrims, 1921 (a study of Ainsworth's Psalter), "The importance of the French Psalter of 1562" in The Musical Quarterly, January 1935, and an edition of the French Psalter in 1939. Pratt was responsible for gathering the large Warrington-Pratt-Soule Collection of hymnals at Hartford Seminary--since 1976 in the Pitts Library, Candler Theological Seminary, Emory University, Atlanta. There is a fine tribute to him by Otto Kinkeldey in The Musical Quarterly, April, 1940.

--Leonard Ellinwood, DNAH Archives