Whitney Eugene Thayer was one of America's first concert organists who gave free recitals as a mission effort for the average person to hear the organ. He also had one of the first private organ studios in America.
The first four organ sonatas by Thayer were published by Bote & Bock most likely in the mid-1860s while he was studying and giving concerts in Germany. These sonatas, while reflecting his Germanic training, have a stylistic simplicity that was a great contrast to much of the other music that he performed in his recitals for the general public. Compositions based on patriotic themes were popular at this time, and Thayer included the ever-popular "God Save the King" in this one and the next. He dedicated his first sonata to John Knowles Paine, his teacher.
The first four organ sonatas by Thayer were published by Bote & Bock most likely in the mid-1860s while he was studying and giving concerts in Germany. These sonatas, while reflecting his Germanic training, have a stylistic simplicity that was a great contrast to much of the other music that he performed in his recitals for the general public. Compositions based on patriotic themes were popular at this time, and Thayer made the most of this by dedicating this piece to Lieutenant-General Ulysses S. Grant, who was later to become the eighteenth president of the United States of America (1869–1877). The first movement of Sonata II was later revised and republished by Oliver Ditson in 1874 as "Fugue on God Save the Queen."
Sonata IV in D minor, Opus 8, was one of the four organ sonatas published in the mid-1860s by Bote & Bock, Berlin, Germany, probably around the time of Thayer’s study there. It is dedicated to Haupt and is the first of Thayer’s sonatas to be composed on original thematic material. While it is the shortest and least demanding technically of his five sonatas, it has the most contrapuntal texture, undoubtedly a tribute to Haupt’s favor of the music of J S Bach.
Sonata V was dedicated to J Warren Andrews (1860–1932), Thayer’s former student and a founder and a Warden (1913–16) of the American Guild of Organists. Thayer’s last sonata was first published twenty-two years after his death. While this is probably a late work, it reflects an earlier, simpler, harmonic style.