CONVERSE

Composer: Charles C. Converse

CONVERSE (also "Erie", named for the city in Pennsylvania where the composer lived for many years) was written in 1868 and published two years later in his Silver Wings under the pseudonym Karl Reden. The tune has also been called "Friendship."

Born in Warren, Massachusetts, on October 7, 1832, Charles Crozat Converse was the son of one of the early settlers of Woburn, Massachusetts. He went to Leipzig in 1855 where he studied law and philosophy, as well as music theory and composition under Moritz Hauptmann, E. Friedrich Richter, and Louis Plaidy at the Leipzig Conservatory. There also he made the acquaintance of Franz Liszt and Louis Spohr. He returned to the United States in 1859 and graduated from the Albany, New York, Law School two years later. From 1875 he practiced law in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he was also in charge of Burdetta Organ Company. He composed a number of hymn tunes, as well as larger works. A Doctor of Music degree was offered him by Sterndale Bennett of Cambridge University in England for the five-voice double fugue at the end of his Psalm-Cantata on Psalm 126, but he declined the offer. In 1895 Rutherford College honored him with a Doctor of Laws degree. He spent his last years in Highwood, New Jersey, where he died October 18, 1918.

–Hymnal Companion to the Lutheran Book of Worship

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