Ebenezer Prout

Ebenezer Prout
(b Oundle, 1 March 1835; d Hackney, 5 Dec 1909). English musical theorist, editor and teacher.

The son of a Congregationalist minister, Prout showed exceptional musical promise as a child, but his father opposed a career in music, and, apart from a course of piano lessons from Charles Salaman, he was entirely self-taught as a musician. He worked as a schoolmaster from 1852, taking the degree of BA (London) in 1854, but in 1859 he turned to music as a profession, initially teaching a singing class at a ladies' school in Hackney and taking private pupils, the first of whom was the organist John Locke Gray. He was organist of several nonconformist chapels, including the Union Chapel, Islington (1861–73), and from 1861 to 1885 was professor of the piano at the Crystal Palace School of Art. In 1862 he won a Society of British Musicians prize with his String Quartet in E op.1, and in 1865 another with his Piano Quartet in E op.2. These works, and the Piano Quintet in G op.3, were published and occasionally played at concerts, but suffer from a rigidity of phrasing and lack originality. Prout taught at the National Training School for Music from 1876 to 1882, at the RAM from 1879, where his pupils included Henry Wood, Edward German and Tobias Matthay, and at the GSM from 1884. From 1876 to 1890 he was conductor of the Hackney Choral Association, for which he composed the cantatas Hereward (1878) and Alfred (1882).