Edward MacDowell

us to the most casual observer of musical art in its contemporary development. The significant work of the most considerable musicians of our time-of Stra

hable Spirit of Romance whose infrequent embodiment in modern music I have remarked. That is a romance in no wise divorced from reality-is, in fact, but reality diviningly perceived; if it uses the old Romanticistic properties, it uses them not because

he older Romanticism. Dryads and elves are his intimate companions, and he dwells at times under fairy boughs and in enchanted woods; but for him, as for the poets of the Celtic tradition, these things are but the manifest images of an interior passion and delight. Seen in the transfiguring mirror of his music, the moods and events of the natural world, and of the drama that plays in

d inward upon the world of the emotions through the transforming eyes of the poet. He would have none of a formal and merely decorative beauty-a beauty serving no expressional need of the heart or the imagination. In this ultimate sense he is to be regarded as a realist-a realist with the romantic's vision, the romantic's preoccupation; and yet he is as alien to the frequently unleavened literalism of Richard Strauss as he is to the academic ideal. Though he conceives the prime mission of music to be interpretive, he insists no less emphatically that, in its funct

perfected design. But if MacDowell's method of transmutation is not the method of Strauss, neither is it the method of Schumann, or of Debussy. He occupies a middle ground between the undaunted literalism of the Munich tone-poet and the sentimental posturings into which the romanticism of Schumann so frequently declined. It is impossible to conceive him attempting

d at the beginning of such works as the "Idyls" and "Poems" after Goethe and Heine, the "Norse" and "Keltic" sonatas, the "Sea Pieces," and the "New England Idyls," the fragment of verse or legend or meditation which has served as the particular stimulus of his inspiration; while in other works he has contented himself with the suggestion of a mood or subject embodied in his title, as, for example, in his "Woodland Sketches,"-"To a Wild Rose," "Will o' the Wisp," "At an Old Trysting Place," "In Autumn," "From an Indian Lodge," "To a Water-Lily," "A Deserted Farm." That he has been tempted, however, in the direction of the compromise to which I have alluded, is evident from the fact that although his symphoni

er a persistent nor determined one; and he was, as I have noted, even less disposed toward the frankly literal methods of which Strauss and his followers are such invinci

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orously sustained, in which he sets forth a poetic concept with memorable vividness-in such things as his terse though astonishingly eloquent apostrophe "To a Wandering Iceberg," and his "In Mid-Ocean," from the "Sea Pieces"; in "To a Water-lily," from the "Woodland Sketches"; in the "Winter" and "In Deep Woods" from the "New England Idyls"; in

s, the sapphire and emerald glories, or the ominous chantings, of the sea, the benign and mysterious majesty of summer stars, the lyric sweetness of a meadow: these things urged him to musical transcripts, notations of loving tenderness and sincerity. His music is redolent of the breath and odour of woodland places, of lanes and moors and gardens; or it is saturated wi

t, an emotion scarcely less swift and abundant. His scope is comprehensive: he can voice the archest gaiety, a naive and charming humour, as in the "Marionettes" and in the songs "From an Ol

hright quality; nor has it any of Debussy's withdrawals. One thinks, as a discerning commentator has observed, of the "broad Shakespearian daylight" of Fitzgerald's fine phrase as being not inapplicable to the atmosphere of MacDowell's writing. He has few reservations, and he shows small liking for recondite effects of harmonic colour, for the wavering melodic line-which is far from implying that he is ever merely obvious or banal: that he never is. His clarity, his directness, find issue in an order of expression at once lucid and distinguished, at once spontaneous and expressive. It is diffi

y in certain pages of Strauss is there anything in contemporary music which compares, for superb virility, dynamic power, and sweep of line, with the opening of the "Keltic" sonata. He has, moreover, a remarkable gift for compact expression. Time and again he astonishes by his ability to charge a composition of the briefest span with an emotional or dramatic content of large and far-reaching significance. His "To the Sea,"[10] for example, is but thirty-one bars long; yet within this limited frame he has confined a tone-picture which for breadth of concept

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it beside the surprising combinations evolved by such innovators as d'Indy, Debussy, and Strauss. It is in the novel disposition of familiar material-in what Mr. Apthorp has happily called his "free, instinctive application of the old in a new way"-that MacDowell's emphatic indi

the banal phrase and the futile decoration. In addition to the plangency of his chord combinations, as such, his polyphonic skill is responsible for much of the solidity of his fabric. His pages, particularly in the more recent works, are studded with examples of felicitous and dexterous counterpoint-poetically significant, and of the most elastic and untrammelled contrivance. Even in passages of a merely episodic character, one is struck with the vitality and importance of his inner voices. Dissonance-in the sense in which we understand dissonance to-day-plays a comparatively unimportant part in his technical method. The climax of the second of

y which are anything but common in the typical music of our day. It is a curious experience to turn from the music of such typical moderns as Loeffler and Debussy, with its elusive melodic contours, its continual avoidance of definite patterns, its passion for the esoteric and its horror of direct communication, to the music of such a writer as MacDowell. For he has accomplished the difficult and perilous feat of writing frankly without obviousness, simply

n distaste for the classic forms. His four sonatas, his two piano concertos, and his two "modern suites" for piano are his only important adventures in the traditional instrumental moulds. The catalogue of his works is innocent of any symphony, overture, string quartet, or cantata. The major portion of his work is as elastic and emancipated in