An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 8 | EDWARD MACDOWELL 195

MacDowell’s suite contains fi ve movements—“Legend,” “Love Song,” “In War-

time,” “Dirge,” and “Village Festival”—each based on a theme he found in Baker.

He once told an interviewer that of all his music, the “Dirge” pleased him most.

MacDowell was not alone in judging this movement a success. His biographer

called it “over whelmingly poig nant,” and composer A rthur Far well, who worked

extensively with American Indian melodies himself, praised its “sheer imagina-

tive beauty.” The “Dirge” is for an absent son who has died. Since the preceding

movement is about war, listeners are invited to think that he has been slain in

battle. By extension, the “Dirge” can also be heard as a lament for the “vanishing

Indian,” written at a time when that population was at its smallest, in a state of

complete subjugation to white conquerors.

MacDowell delayed the fi rst performance for several years, for fear that

“this rough, savage music” would not “appeal to our concert audiences.” By the

time the suite was premiered in 1896, the American visit of Bohemian composer

Antonín Dvorˇák had brought the issue of musical nationalism into the public

arena. Dvorˇák arrived in the United States in 1892 as director of the National

Conservatory of Music in New York, and remained until 1895. He had been

invited by Jeannette Thurber, a patron who, in setting up the National Conser-

vatory, hoped to encourage the growth of national musical culture—if possible,

with funding from the U.S. government.

Dvorˇák became a public advocate for musical nationalism in America. He

showed particular interest in melodies native to the United States—especially

African American plantation melodies and Indian tunes. In the spring of 1893

he told the New York Herald that, after eight months in America, he was “now

satisfi ed... that the future music of this country must be founded upon what

are called negro melodies.... There is nothing in the whole range of composi-

tion that cannot be supplied with themes from this source.” Then, as if to show

how composers on this side of the Atlantic might proceed, Dvorˇák wrote his

Symphony no. 9, From the New World, inspired in part by African American and

American Indian melodies and rhythms.

MacDowell, who had fi nished his own Indian Suite two years before the well-

publicized premiere of the New World Symphony in December 1893, took a dim

view of the attention that Dvorˇák’s ideas received. “Purely national music,” he

wrote, “has no place in art, for its characteristics may be duplicated by anyone

who takes the fancy to do so.... We have here in America been offered a pattern

for an ‘American’ national musical costume by the Bohemian Dvorˇák, though

what the Negro melodies have to do with Americanism in art still remains a mys-

tery.” MacDowell objected to Dvorˇák’s meddling and considered his prescription

for national music shallow. “Music that can be made by ‘recipe,’” he wrote, “is

not music, but ‘tailoring.’” Moreover, music based on tunes by slaves and for-

mer slaves might exude Americanism, but what would it say about the nation’s

character? On the other hand, he argued, the music of Indians pointed toward

a heroic past, an unspoiled continental landscape, and an American people of

independent spirit.

To MacDowell, the goal of musical nationalism should be elevating: to echo

the “genius” of the nation. And that could be achieved only by composers “who,

being part of the people, love the country for itself” and who “put into their

music what the nation has put into its life.” Furthermore, both composers and

the public needed to seize “freedom from the restraint that an almost unlimited

Dvorˇ ák and

nationalism

MacDowell and

Dvorˇák

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