Henry Taylor Parker

Henry Taylor Parker (29 April 1867 – 30 March 1934), known primarily by his initials H. T. P., was an American theater and music critic. Time said Parker's "reviews were famed" and for "29 years he had been Boston's oracle on theatre and music." In 1922, Parker wrote the book Eighth Notes: Voices and Figures of Music and the Dance.

Parker was a distinctive character. According to Time:

Critic Parker's initials, all he ever signed, gave him the nicknames of "Hard-to-Please" and "Hell-to-Pay." But he was seldom vitriolic. His reviews were famed chiefly for their length (1,250 words, at least), their ornate, old-fashioned sentences, their freshness and independence of viewpoint. Boston knew him for a sputtery, gnomelike person who wore a flowing cape for evening, carried a stout bamboo stick, shunned conversation. He did most of his writing between 3 and 5 a. m., always in longhand on yellow ruled paper. Afternoons saw him in his musty, little Transcript office, painstakingly correcting proof, sorting and editing the world's stage news. No one ever dared to call his page provincial. Parker met Virgil Thomson before the young composer left Cambridge, Massachusetts for Paris. Parker arranged for Thomson to critique musical events in Paris for the Boston Evening Transcript, thus starting Thomson's career as a professional critic.

Parker died from pneumonia at age 66 three days before the opening of a Metropolitan Opera visit to Boston that he helped promote. In his obituary it was said the "little man was missed at the Friday afternoon Symphony where for years he had sat in the front row of the balcony, the seat beside him vacant.

Parker's biography H. T. P.: Portrait of a Critic by David McCord was published the year after his death. Some of Parker's reviews were collected and posthumously published in 1982 as Motion Arrested: Dance Reviews of H. T. Parker edited by Olive Holmes.