Scan 16
Grove's dictionary of music and musicians;, 1904
8 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1MacDOWELL
3Marmontel in pianoforte at the Paris Conservatoire. For three years he remained under French influences, then exchanged them for German, going first to Stuttgart to Lebert; but wearying of that teacher's pedagogic methods, in less than a month, he went to Wiesbaden, where he studied with Louis Ehlert during the summer months of 1882. In the autumn he joined the pianoforte class of Karl Heymann at the Conservatorium, and the class in composition under Joachim Raff, director of the institution. The admiration which he felt for Raff's music, and the attachment which sprang up between master and pupil were among the strongest influences which shaped his creative career, and speak out of much of his music, especially the first suite for orchestra, op. 42. On Heymann's departure from the Conservatorium MacDowell was a candidate for the position vacated by him, but failed of appointment, ostensibly because of his youthfulness, probably because of his adherence to the romantic ideals exemplified in Heymann's playing. Thereupon he went to Darmstadt as chief teacher at the Conservatorium there. The duties were onerous, and the compensation inadequate. MacDowell had made up his mind to stay in Germany as a country more congenial to his artistic nature than his native land. He returned to Frankfort as a private teacher. In 1882, at the instance of Raff, he went to Weimar to visit Liszt. He played his first concerto for that master with D'Albert at the second pianoforte, and was invited to take part in the approaching meeting of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein at Zurich. There he played his first Pianoforte Suite. Raff died shortly after, and MacDowell set up a home in Wiesbaden, where he devoted himself to composition for four years, that is, till 1887. Then he went to America, settled in Boston, taught and gave concerts, producing his two pianoforte concertos with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Boston, and the Theodore Thomas Orchestra in New York. [The second concerto was played by the composer at the Philharmonic Concert, London, on May 14, 1903.] In 1896 he was called to Columbia University in New York to fill the chair of music,—a new foundation. He remained professor at the institution until January 1904, when he resigned the post because of a disagreement with the faculty touching the proper footing of music and the fine arts in the curriculum. For two years he was conductor of the Mendelssohn Glee Club, one of the oldest and best male choruses in the United States. Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania conferred on him the degree of Mus.Doc. Mr. MacDowell's career ended in the spring of 1905, when overwork and insomnia, the consequence of morbid worry over disagreeable experiences, brought on what eminent medical specialists pronounced to be a hopeless case of cerebral collapse.
5MacDOWELL
7When Mr. MacDowell went to Boston he gave a healthy impulse to American composition, chiefly through the performances of his works which had been stimulated by his return to his native land, but also by the attitude which he assumed as to the proper treatment of the American composer by the American public and press. He expressed himself as opposed to their segregation for the purpose either of laudation or condemnation. Naturally this came somewhat easier to him than to some of his fellows. He had grown artistically into man's estate in Germany, and had won quite as much recognition there as he found waiting for him in America when he returned thither. It deserves to be said that he found his position upheld by the majority of American musicians worthy of association with him. As a composer MacDowell is a romanticist. He believes in poetical suggestion and programmatic titles. But a musical cartoonist he is not. He aims at depicting the moods of things, and the moods awakened by things rather than the things themselves. He is fond of subjects and titles which, like those of his master Raff, smack of the woods;—not the greenwood of the English ballads, but the haunted forests of Germany, in which nymphs and dryads hold their revels and kobolds frolic. The supernaturalism which is an ineradicable element of German romanticism, breathes through his first suite for orchestra. In his second suite, entitled 'Indian,' he makes use of aboriginal American idioms, forming his principal themes out of variants of Indian melodies,—a harvest-song, war-song, and women's dance of the Iroquois, and a love-song of the Iowas. A similar device is practised in the first of his 'Woodland Sketches' for pianoforte, op. 51, which has a melody of the Brotherton Indians as its theme. Mr. MacDowell was contemporaneous with Dvořák in thus calling attention to the existence of native American folk-song elements capable of use in a characteristic body of artistic music, though, unlike the composer of the symphony 'From the New World,' he never permitted himself to be influenced by the melodic idioms of the negro slave. His 'Indian' suite, op. 48, first played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in New York in Jan. 1896, was fully sketched before Dvořák's symphony appeared, though it was not performed till three years afterwards, the composer wishing to become better acquainted with what to him, as well as the world, was a new kind of music. As for the rest: great concentration, refined and highly emotionalised harmonisation, exalted poetical feeling and a spirit of breezy freshness are the characteristics chiefly to be found in Mr. MacDowell's compositions for the pianoforte. He withheld his first eight numbered works from his publishers, and subsequently destroyed them. His published works are as follows:—
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