[1] One brother Arthur Atwood was the senior member of the New York law firm of Root, Clark, Buckner & Ballantine—later Dewey, Ballantine, Bushby, Palmer & Wood.
Elisha Ballantine,[3] he is distantly related to four U.S. Presidents, and descended from the first American female writer Anne Bradstreet, and from Massachusetts Bay Colony founder and first Governor John Winthrop.
[4] He studied with Walter Spalding and Frederick Converse at Harvard University, where he received a BA in 1907.
[5] He then pursued his studies with Artur Schnabel, Rudolf Ganz, and Philippe Rüferthen in Berlin from 1907 to 1909.
He returned to the United States where he joined the Harvard music faculty in 1912, where he remained until his retirement in 1947.