Charles Dennée

Charles Frederick Dennée was an American composer. He wrote many pedagogical pieces for piano and composed a number of songs. He wrote the scores for two Broadway musicals. He compiled a series of four books for piano study, published under the International Library of Music during his time as a piano professor at the New England Conservatory of Music. The four published collections include his original pieces for technical piano study, small etude studies, explanatory text by Dennée, and a selection of well-known classical composers.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article on Charles Dennée.

From the period sources

Charles Dennée, born in Oswego, New York, in 1863, began his musical training at the New England Conservatory in Boston at the age of sixteen, studying piano with A. D. Turner and later Mme. Schiller, and harmony and composition with S. A. Emery, according to A Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (1905). Since 1883, he has been a leading piano teacher at that institution, a role he continued after an accident to his right wrist forced his retirement as a successful concert pianist by 1897, as noted in Grove’s Dictionary (1920). His subsequent devotion to teaching and composition “has borne good fruit,” including several comedy-operas like The Defender and The Royal Barber, and about fifty “elegant salon-comp.s and charact. pieces” for piano. Dennée also authored “Progressive Technique,” an elaborate treatise on piano technics, and was, by 1905, at work on a new technical treatise and a one-act grand tragic opera, Chatterton. His influence extended to his students, among them Arthur Shepherd, who studied piano with Dennée at the New England Conservatory in the 1890s, as recorded in Grove’s Dictionary (1920).