Philip Greeley Clapp

Philip Greeley Clapp (August 4, 1888 – April 9, 1954) was an American educator, conductor, pianist, and composer of classical music. He is remembered as the long-time Director of the School of Music at the University of Iowa (1919–53), who helped establish the school's strong reputation in music and in the arts overall.

Clapp was a strong advocate for the idea that music and other arts should be an integral part of a liberal arts education and succeeded in creating robust graduate programs that awarded degrees not just in scholarship and research but also in performance and creation.

Clapp was born into a musical family on August 4, 1888, in Boston, Massachusetts. By the time he was seven, he had begun to learn piano from his mother, Florence Greeley Clapp, and his aunt, Mary Greeley James. He was taught playing violin by Jacques Hoffman in the years 1895-1905. At age 11, he began to study theory and later composition under the dean of the Boston University Music Department, John P. Marshall (1905).

Clapp then entered Harvard University, studying theory and composition with organist Walter Raymond Spalding, classical music composer Frederick Converse, and Edward Burlingame Hill. He has also studied with classical composer William Clifford Heilman. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1908, Master of Arts degree in 1909, and Ph.D. in 1911.

At the same time, Clapp also studied under German-born Swiss classical music composer Karl Muck, the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He also studied composition and conducting in Stuttgart, Germany under a Harvard fellowship with Max von Schillings (1909-1910).

After finishing his education, Clapp was a teaching fellow at Harvard University in the years 1911-1912. From 1915 to 1918, he was music director at Dartmouth College and other colleges. In September 1919, he joined the University of Iowa as the director of the music department with the goal of organizing an official music department because such instruction had been private since 1906. In 1932, he was promoted to the position of Director of the School of Music at Iowa—a position he held until his retirement on July 1, 1953. He was instrumental in establishing the university as a key player in music and arts overall. Renowned German composer Gene Gutchë was one of his students.

While serving as a pedagogue, Clapp, in parallel, continued as a composer and conducted the University Symphony Orchestra, among others. As a composer, he followed firmly in the line of Romantic and Impressionist works created by Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Claude Debussy, as well as Franz Liszt, and others, but adding his own distinctly American style and ideas about orchestration.

Although a number of Clapp's compositions were never performed, several of his twelve symphonies were premiered by major orchestras and conductors, including Dimitri Mitropoulos and the New York Philharmonic, who gave the first public performance of the Eighth Symphony in Carnegie Hall on February 7, 1952. Karl Muckarranged for him to conduct the world premieres of his First and Third Symphonies with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Clapp died of a heart attack at the age of 65 on April 9, 1954, in Iowa City, Iowa. The University of Iowa Clapp Recital Hall was named in his honor in 1971.

[Philip Greeley Clapp (1888-1954): Symphony No. 9 "Pioneers" (1933)]