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Updated: May 28, 2025
The "Indian Idyl," "To an Old White Pine," and "From Puritan Days" are also contrived in the familiar idiom of the earlier volumes, though they are unfailingly resourceful in invention and imaginative vigour. In "From a Log Cabin," though, we come upon as surprising a thing as MacDowell's art had yielded us since the appearance of the "Woodland Sketches."
With this combination of velocity and close touch, it was a slight matter to produce those pianistic effects which were especially dear to him. "MacDowell's finger development has been thus dwelt upon, because it was, as has been said, the feature of his technic which immediately surprised and captivated his hearers. Less noticeable was his wrist and octave work.
As conveying an idea of MacDowell's methods in the class-room I cannot do better than quote from a vivid account of him in this aspect written by one of his pupils, Miss J.S. Watson: "A crowd of noisy, expectant students sat in the lecture room nervously eyeing the door and the clock by turns.
Permit me therefore to express to you my own and my wife's sincerest sympathy for you. I am a great admirer of MacDowell's Muse, and would regard it as a severe blow if his best creative period should be so hastily broken off. From all that I hear of your husband, his qualities as a man are as remarkable as his qualities as an artist.
MacDowell's experiences at the Conservatory were not unmixed with perplexities and embarrassment. His knowledge of French was far from secure, and he had considerable difficulty in following Savard's lectures. It was decided, therefore, that he should have a course of tuition in the language.
He recognised, and he affirmed the belief, that racial elements are transitory and mutable, and that provinciality in art, even when it is called patriotism, makes for a probable oblivion. I have already dwelt upon MacDowell's preoccupation with the pageant of the natural world.
In a word, it was felt that its immediate publication would obviate any possible misconception at some future time as to its true relation to MacDowell's artistic evolution. It was, therefore, published in October, 1908, twenty years after its composition, with a dedication to Mr. Henry T. Finck.
MacDowell's candidacy was opposed by certain of the professors, on account, it was said, of his "youth"; but also, doubtless, because of the advocacy of Heymann, who was not popular with his colleagues; for he dared, MacDowell has said, "to play the classics as if they had been written by men with blood in their veins." So MacDowell failed to get the appointment.
As an example of successful pieces of this kind, consider MacDowell's "The Eagle." It is the musical realization of Tennyson's well-known poem: "He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring'd with the azure world, he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls."
After their return from the sabbatical vacation abroad they lived for a year at the Westminster Hotel in Irving Place, and for a year in an apartment house on upper Seventh Avenue, near Central Park. When that was sold and torn down they returned to the Westminster; and there MacDowell's last days were spent.
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