John Petrie Dunn (1878–1931) was the son of a Scottish school inspector. He attended the University of Edinburgh from 1896 to 1899, where he was among the outstanding students of Frederick Niecks; a Bucher Scholarship enabled him to continue his studies abroad. At the Stuttgart Conservatory he had piano lessons from Max Pauer and studied theory with Samuel de Lange; later he joined the teaching staff there. In 1909 he moved to Kiel, as Professor of piano and, subsequently, as Vice-Principal of the Conservatory, where his first book, Das Geheimnis der Handführung beim Klavierspiel, was written; it is probably in Kiel that he met his future wife, Aline, who was a pupil of his there and is described in a letter from Hoboken to Schenker (see below) as “much younger.” After serving in the Royal Scots during the War, he settled in Edinburgh, first as a private piano teacher and, from 1920, as lecturer in music at the University, where he worked alongside—and somewhat in the shadow of—Niecks’s successor, Donald Francis Tovey. In spite of inordinate classroom and private teaching duties, Dunn published two further books, Ornamentation in the Works of Chopin (1921) and A Student’s Guide to Orchestration (in 1928, the year he received a DMA from Edinburgh). He was also active as a performer, both as a soloist and with his wife, Aline; Tovey, in an “Appreciation” to the obituary of Dunn published in The Scotsman (February 6, 1931), singled out two works—Beethoven’s Op. 109 and Brahms’s Paganini Variations—in which he showed consummate technical mastery and profound musical understanding.

It was during the later part of his time at Edinburgh that Dunn began corresponding with Schenker, initially to inquire after Free Composition (a local bookshop had told him that it was “out of print”!). He was among the earliest English-speaking music teachers—almost certainly the first in the United Kingdom—to pursue an active interest in Schenker’s theoretical project of the 1920s, which led him to prepare an English version of sections from Counterpoint 2 (1927), and to include an excerpt from Schenker’s Ninth Symphony monograph in his Orchestration. Schenker readily admitted Dunn into his circle; he asked Hoboken to visit him in Edinburgh, and Dunn’s name is listed among Schenker’s disciples in the eleventh edition of Riemanns Musiklexikon (1929).