Newspaper Clipping

LI_news_owl_1976-08-13.jpg

Title

Newspaper Clipping

Description

Edith McIntosh, Piano School Founder, Dies

Date

1976-08-13

Creator

Long Island News and the Owl

Rights

May be subject to copyright restrictions.

Language

English

Type

text

Identifier

LI_news_owl_1976-08-13

Spatial Coverage

Oceanside, NY

Text

Edith F. McIntosh, the founder and director of the McIntosh School of Music on Hillside avenue died Thursday, August 5, at her home in Oceanside. She was 84 years old and had been ill for two years previous to her death. Funeral services were held at the Clayton & Forbell Funeral Home on Monday morning. The Rev. Donald C. Latham of the Church of the Ascension officiated. Burial was in Greenfield Cemetery, Hempstead. Miss McIntosh was born June 4, 1892 in Brooklyn and moved to Rockville Centre with her parents Alexander and Susan McIntosh a year later. Her father was a cabinet maker and furniture restorer. Of all children in the Macintosh family only Edith excelled in music and her parents took special pains to provide for her education. When she was old enough to travel she was sent to Europe to study with the most important pianists of their day. In Paris she studied with Isadore Phillip and Mme Bert. In London she learned what was then the revolutionary teaching principles of Matthay directly from their author. At the same time she studied with Harold Craxton, the famous critic and editor of the complete sonatas of Beethoven. She returned to the United States and took her degrees from what was then Oneonta Normal School, now a college in the state university system, and from New York University. After a brief period of teaching history in the public school system of Huntington, Miss McIntosh returned to Rockville Centre and began her long career as a piano teacher. The first classrooms of the McIntosh School were above stores on North Village avenue. In 1920 she moved to the top floor suite of the new Nassau Daily Review-Star building on Sunrise highway. The building now houses the Inter County Blood Bank. In 1936, in the height of the depression Miss McIntosh decided to build the Music Center on Hillside Avenue. Designed by her brother-in-law, the late L.C. Dillenback, former chairman of the School of Architecture of the University of Rochester, the building was the first of its kind on Long Island devoted exclusively to music instruction and concert giving. For the next twenty years the building served as a cultural center for the community, bringing to the area important and noted pianist and performers, as well as providing a setting for recitals given by the school itself, and by neighboring schools which did not have the stage and audience capacity of the Music Center. In 1950, Miss McIntosh began writing what was to be a series of five music theory books. As each book was written it was published by Carl Fischer, Inc, the New York music publisher. Remarkably, her books have been remained best sellers for twenty years. Before her death, Miss McIntosh talked of establishing a Fund for music scholarships given out of the royalties received from her books. Miss McIntosh was a perennial traveler who toured the world each summer. She always concluded her trip with a five week stop in England where, until she was eighty, she took piano lessons from Denise Lassamone, a former student of Matthay. Thousands of students passed through the McIntosh School in the years when Edith McIntosh taught there. Most students took lessons only for their private pleasure, but many did go on to professional careers in music, some in orchestral work, others in music education. Until the past two years, Miss McIntosh kept up an extensive correspondence with many of them. Edith McIntosh leaves her nephews Alexander and Donald Bane McIntosh, and her nieces Virginia Crites of North Carolina and Mary Lou Butler of Pennsylvania.

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Long Island News and the Owl, “Newspaper Clipping,” Edith McIntosh School of Music Digital Scrapbook: A Community History Project, accessed March 28, 2024, https://edithsmusicrvc.com/items/show/257.