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Updated: May 28, 2025
It must have already become evident to anyone who has followed this essay at an exposition of MacDowell's art that his view of the traditional musical forms is a liberal one. Which is briefly to say that, although his application to his art of the fundamental principles of musical design is deliberate and satisfying, he shares the typical modern distaste for the classic forms.
These opinions are of interest, for they testify to the prompt and ungrudging recognition which was accorded to MacDowell's work, from the first, by responsible critics in his own country. He might well have felt some pride in the sum of his achievements at this time.
After one of his concerts I wrote in the glow of enthusiasm that I would rather hear him than any pianist in the field excepting Paderewski; that utterance I never saw reason to modify." For an interesting and closely observed description of MacDowell's technical peculiarities as a piano player I am indebted to his friend and pupil, Mr. Currier. "For him, too, it was a mere bagatelle.
The sonata formula is warped to the purpose of the poet, but the themes have the classic ideal of kinship. The battle-power of the work is tremendous. Huneker calls it "an epic of rainbow and thunder," and Henry T. Finck, who has for many years devoted a part of his large ardor to MacDowell's cause, says of the work: "It is MacDowellish, more MacDowellish than anything he has yet written.
Here, too, are the far-off, "wrinkled sea," and the final cataclysmic and sudden descent: yet, despite the literalism of the close, there is no yielding of artistic sobriety in the result, for the music has an unassailable dignity. It remains, even to-day, one of MacDowell's most characteristic and admirable performances.
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.
Heffley, while entertaining reverence for the older masters, is very progressive, always on the alert to discover a new trend of thought, a new composer, a new gospel in musical art. He did much to make known and arouse enthusiasm for MacDowell's compositions, when they were as yet almost unheard of in America.
When I tripped upon the beginning of notation for instruments, he looked up quickly and said, 'Better look that up again; that's important. "At the lectures Professor MacDowell's aim had been to emphasise those things that had served to mark the bright spots in the growth and advancement of music as an intelligible language.
W.H. Humiston, recalls that, in going over MacDowell's sketchbooks and manuscripts after his death, he found that many of the manuscripts had been rewritten several times: "I would find a movement begun and continued for half a page, then it would be broken off suddenly, and a remark like this written at the end: 'Hand organ to the rescue!"
His harmony, per se, is not unusual, if one sets 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 individuality consists.
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