An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 8 | EDWARD MACDOWELL 193

MACDOWELL AND MUSICAL NATIONALISM

Not long after his return from Germany, MacDowell found himself involved in

a debate about the future direction of American music. When the debate began,

suspicious of the idea of musical nationalism as an end in itself, he opposed

“exclusively American” concerts, considering them more political events than

artistic ones. In the long run, he believed, composers were better off having to

earn performances purely on the basis of their work’s quality.

Beyond musical politics, however, lay musical style. And here MacDowell

aspired to the universality that European classics had achieved. In nineteenth-

century Europe, nationalism and universality were closely connected. Music

in the classical sphere was given a nationalist slant by borrowing material from

local folk music, especially in newly emerging nations such as Poland, Russia,

and Bohemia—in much the same way as each nation had its own language, folklore,

music, fl ag, and institutions, while remaining part of cosmopolitan Europe. Indeed,

it was their creation of a national fl avor that brought composers like Frederic Cho-

pin, Modest Musorgsky, and Antonin Dvorˇák international recognition. Mac-

Dowell aimed at a parallel kind of universality by “working toward a music which

should be American,” as he told the writer Hamlin Garland in 1896. “Our music

thus far is mainly a scholarly restatement of Old-World themes; in other words it is

derived from Germany—as all my earlier pieces were.” MacDowell resolved to be an

American composer in the way that Musorgsky was a Russian composer: by treating

his own country as the equivalent of a peripheral European nation and bringing the

landscape and indigenous American materials into his own European-based style.

He perceived, in other words, that the road to universality led through nationalism.

MacDowell’s Woodland Sketches, op. 51 (1896), reveal one way in which he

claimed an American composer’s identity. The work consists of ten short piano

pieces whose titles refer to the American landscape and connect with the com-

poser’s personal experience. With such titles as “To a Wild Rose,” “By a Meadow

Brook,” and “A Deserted Farm,” the individual pieces register MacDowell’s

impressions of the New England countryside.

In “To a Wild Rose” (LG 8.2), dissonances bring to MacDowell’s sound image

of a woodland fl ower just enough tonal ambiguity to cast an aura of mystery.

Although MacDowell generally favored thick, complex chords, here the texture

is transparent, with never more than fi ve notes in a chord. MacDowell’s music

invites the listener to share his personal impression of a commonplace experi-

ence of coming upon a wild rose in its natural surroundings.

The musical style of “To a Wild Rose” is rooted in European practice and no

American melodies are quoted, yet the native lineage of this work is also clear.

For all the years he spent in Europe, MacDowell was a born-and-bred American,

and the New England countryside inspired the Woodland Sketches shortly after he

told Garland that he was “working toward a music which should be American.”

W hat, then, constitutes American music? Is it a matter of style? nationality? sub-

ject? quotation of indigenous music? the composer’s intent?

At least since the time of Gottschalk (see chapter 5), the question has sparked

interest and controversy. So many different criteria have been used to measure

musical Americanism that there seems little hope of fi nding a defi nition sat-

isfactory to all. From one perspective, MacDowell’s career and music show the

composer’s dependence on Europe; from another, the American identity of a

LG 8.2

European nationalism

Woodland Sketches

American nationalism

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