Buck, though intended for commercial life, borrowed a work on thorough-bass and a flute and proceeded to try the wings of his muse. A melodeon supplanted the flute, and when he was sixteen he attained the glory of a piano, a rare possession in those times. (Would that it were rarer now!) He took a few lessons and played a church-organ for a salary,--a small thing, but his own. After reaching the junior year in Trinity College, he prevailed upon his parents to surrender him to music, an almost scandalous career in the New England mind of that day, still unbleached of its Blue Laws. At the age of nineteen he went to Leipzig and entered the Conservatory there, studying composition under Hauptmann and E.F. Richter, orchestration under Rietz, and the piano under Moscheles and Plaidy. Later he went to Dresden and studied the organ with Schneider. After three years in Germany, he studied for a year in Paris, and came home, settling down in Hartford as church-organist and teacher. He began a series of organ-concert tours lasting fifteen years. He played in almost every important city and in many small towns, popularizing the best music by that happy fervor of interpretation which alone is needed to bring classical compositions home to the public heart. In 1869 he was called to the "mother-church" of Chicago. In the Chicago fire he lost many valuable manuscripts, including a concert overture on Drake's exquisite poem, "The Culprit Fay," which must be especially regretted. He moved his family to Boston, assuming in ten days the position of organist at St. Paul's; and later he accepted charge of "the great organ" at Music Hall,--that organ of which Artemus Ward wrote so deliciously. In 1875 Theodore Thomas, whose orchestra had performed many of Buck's compositions, invited him to become his assistant conductor at the Cincinnati Music Festival and at the last series of concerts at the Central Park Garden in New York. Buck accepted and made his home in Brooklyn, where he has since remained as organist of the Holy Trinity Church, and conductor of the Apollo Club, which he founded and brought to a high state of efficiency, writing for it many of his numerous compositions for male voices. Buck's close association with church work has naturally led him chiefly into sacred music, and in this class of composition he is by many authorities accorded the very highest place among American composers. He has also written many organ solos, sonatas, marches, a pastorale, a rondo caprice, and many concert transcriptions, as well as a group of etudes for pedal phrasing, and several important treatises on various musical topics. His two "Motett Collections" were a refreshing relief and inspiration to church choirs thirsty for religious Protestant music of some depth and warmth.