Birth and Studies
Fox, born in Princeton, Illinois to Miles and Birdie Fox, showed musical talent at an early age. He began playing the organ for church services at the age of ten, and made his concert debut in 1926 before an audience of 2500 at Withrow High School, Cincinnati. The program included one of the mainstays of 19th-century organ music: Mendelssohn's Sonata No. 1 in F minor.
From 1926 to 1930, he studied in Chicago under German-born organist-composer Wilhelm Middelschulte. His other principal teachers were Hugh Price, Louis Robert, and (once he had moved to France) Marcel Dupré. He was an alumnus of the Peabody Institute of Music in Baltimore, where he became the first student to complete the course for the Artist's Diploma within a year.
Read more about this topic: Virgil Fox
Famous quotes containing the words birth and/or studies:
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“His life itself passes deeper in nature than the studies of the naturalist penetrate; himself a subject for the naturalist. The latter raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search of insects; the former lays open logs to their core with his axe, and moss and bark fly far and wide. He gets his living by barking trees. Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)