Reiss was trained as a lawyer; he received his
candidate of law degree in 1886, and he started working as a secretary in the Ministry of Culture and Church Affairs in 1899. He was a pupil of
Ludvig Mathias Lindeman,
Otto Winter-Hjelm, and
Christian Cappelen. Later he also studied at the
Academy of Music in
Berlin. He was organist at Saint Peter's Church (since 1962
Sofienberg Church) in
Kristiania from 1893 to 1914, and he was a music reviewer for
Dagbladet from 1893 to 1896, for
Nordisk Musikrevue from 1903 to 1906, and for
Verdens Gang from 1904 onward. Reiss himself wrote a church cantata in 1902, and other compositions for voice and choir, including an eight-part
kyrie. With support from the
Nansen Foundation and as a
government scholar starting in 1908, Reiss studied
neume notation, paleography, and medieval music theory, published manuscripts from the
National Archives, worked on two sequences for
Saint Olav, and received a PhD in 1913 with his dissertation
Musiken ved den middelalderlige Olavsdyrkelse i Norden (Music in the Medieval Olav Cult in the Nordic Countries), which was Norway's first doctorate in music history. ==Family==