Critical and Historical Essays gathers the lectures the American composer Edward MacDowell delivered at Columbia University, where he held the first chair of music in the country. Ranging across the history of the art, MacDowell traces musical expression from its earliest forms through the suggestive power of melody, rhythm, and form, offering a composer’s view of how music carries meaning.
Wide-ranging and personal, the essays move from ancient and medieval music to the Romantic masters MacDowell admired, mixing scholarship with the practical insight of a working artist. The lectures preserve the thinking of one of the United States’ most significant nineteenth-century composers, and remain a graceful introduction to the aesthetics of music for the general reader and student alike.