Biography is taken from The New Grove Dictionary of American Music . Article by William Osborne.
John Wheeler Tufts was born on May 12, 1825 in Dover, New Hampshire. He was a music educator and organist. After studying in Frankfurt and Leipzig, he settled in Bangor and then Portland, Maine, where he was active as a church organist and conductor of a choral society that he had organized. About 1880, he moved to Boston, where he served as organist of Kings Chapel for 15 years. There he took a principal role in the efforts to reform the teaching of music in primary schools, by involving all public school teachers instead of allowing it to remain the responsibility of music supervisors. Mostly in association with Hosea E. Holt, he compiled several didactic works such as The Normal Music Course: a Series of Exercises, Studies and Songs, Defining and Illustrating the Art of Sight Singing (1885-98). Ancillary publications included The Aeolean Collection: Part Songs for female voices and Third Reader Supplement of the Normal School Course (1888). He also compiled several anthologies of vocal music for use in schools and in singing clubs. According to L. C. Elson, author of The History of American Musi c, Tufts was a competent composer, a good contrapuntist, and a thorough musician; his carefully graded courses gave public school music training a much firmer foundation that it had ever had before. Tufts died on March 18, 1908 in Camden, Maine.
From the guide to the John Wheeler Tufts Collection, 1813-1987, 1835-1908, (Special Collections in Performing Arts)
