Edward MacDowell
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.