Edward Alexander Macdowell, one of America’s most significant
19th-century composers, was born in New York City on December 18, 1861.
After preliminary music study with private teachers, he attended the
Paris Conservatory from 1876 to 1878, and the Frankfort Conservatory in
Germany from 1879 to 1881. Maintaining his home in Germany, MacDowell
joined the faculty of the Darmstadt Conservatory in 1881, and in 1882 he
made an official bow as a composer by introducing his first piano
concerto in Zurich, and his _Modern Suite_ for piano in Germany. He
returned to the United States in 1888, settling in Boston where a year
later the Boston Symphony under Gericke introduced his now-famous Second
Piano Concerto, the composer appearing as soloist. From then on, most of
his important symphonic works were introduced by the Boston Symphony,
placing him in the vanguard of American composers of that period. In
1896 he filled the first chair of music created at Columbia University
in New York; at that time he was described as “the greatest musical
genius America has produced.” MacDowell resigned in 1904 after sharp
differences with the trustees of the University over the way a music
department should be run. The bitterness and frustrations suffered by
MacDowell during this altercation with the University undermined and
finally broke his always delicate health. His brain tissues became
affected. From 1905 on he was a victim of insanity, spending his time in
an innocent, childlike state, until his death in New York City on
January 23, 1908. Shortly after his death the MacDowell Memorial
Association was founded to establish a retreat for American creative
artists on MacDowell’s summer residence in Peterborough, New Hampshire,
which MacDowell’s widow had deeded to the Association.
A composer whose artistic roots lay deep in the soil of German
Romanticism, MacDowell was a composer who filled his writing with noble
poetic sentiments and the most sensitive emotions. His sense of style
and his feeling for structure were the last words in elegance, and his
lyricism and harmonic language were ever ingratiatingly inviting to the
ear.
The _Indian Suite_, op. 48 (1892) is the second of MacDowell’s suites
for orchestra. It is one of several works in which MacDowell uses
melodic and rhythmic material of the American Indian, blending this
idiom with his usual sensitive and poetic style. This is one of
MacDowell’s most popular works for orchestra. The first movement,
“Legend,” has a slow introduction in which the main melody is given by
three unaccompanied horns in unison. The melody is taken over by other
instruments and developed. Here the material comes from a sacred
ceremony of Iroquois Indians. The second movement is “Love Song,” whose
principal subject is immediately given by the woodwind; this melody is
derived from the music of Iowa Indians. “War Time” follows, a movement
dominated by a melody to which Indians of the Atlantic Coast ascribed
supernatural origin. This melody is heard in the first sixteen measures
in two unison unaccompanied flutes. A subsidiary section follows.
“Dirge,” the fourth movement, is a woman’s song of mourning for an
absent son, come from the Kiowa Indians. The mournful melody is heard in
muted violins. The suite ends with “Village Festival,” in which two
light and vivacious melodies from the Iroquois Indians are presented;
the first is a woman’s dance, and the second a war song.
The most familiar pieces of music written by MacDowell—_To a Water Lily_
and _To a Wild Rose_—come from the _Woodland Sketches_, op. 51 (1896), a
suite for solo piano made up of ten sections, each a descriptive poem in
tones. In this suite MacDowell became one of the first American
composers to interpret the beauty of American scenes and countrysides in
delicate melodies. Both _To a Water Lily_ and _To a Wild Rose_ are
exquisite tone pictures of Nature, and both have enjoyed numerous
transcriptions. The other eight movements of the _Woodland Sketches_
are: _Will o’ the Wisp_, _At an Old Trysting Place_, _In Autumn_, _From
an Old Indian Lodge_, _From Uncle Remus_, _A Deserted Farm_, _By a
Meadow Brook_, and _Told at Sunset_.