The Music of Edward Macdowell.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLV, Issue 17, 26 October 1910, Page 16

The Music of Edward Macdowell.

(By

D. C. PARKER.)

Oscar Wilde once remarked that the youth of America was its ' oldest tradition. This was more than a flippant phrase which had escaped from the lips of a clever man. It had some truth behind it. Many people have an idea that the whole of America is in a state, of civilised savagery. The great men ■of concord give the lie to that at once. In a hundred fields of activity America has won an honoured place. In music her position is peculiar. She has her merchant princes and captains of industry but she has not yet found her Beethoven. It is easier to discover virgin soil on the face of the globe than in the region of sharps and flats. This does not mean that America is not playing a big role in the musical world. The greatest artists are heard from New York to San Francisco and it must not be forgotten that the “Sin•fonia Domestica” was first heard in the former city. There is indeed a great band of musical activity reaching from the Eastern seaboard to the towns of the West. But of creative genius the United States have given little to the world, and the peculiar thing is that out of the turmoil of her immense commercial activity there has emerged a voice so quiet and so tender that it is scarcely heard. I mean, of course, Edward MacDowell. It is not long since the composer died, and the fact that he occupied an unique place in modern music has lately thrust itself upon the public. As long as you see a man taking his daily walk and dressed as other men are, as long as you sit near him drinking his beer, smoking his cigar and reading his newspaper it is not easy to value him at his true artistic worth. The average individual finds it difficult to persuade himself that a man v. ho Hoes not wear a Byron collar is more interested in sonnets than in debenture bonds. But when an artist dies, the commonplaces fall from out our reckoning. We do not consider the cut of his coat but the richness or ornamentation of his mental apparel. MacDowell the man is no longer with us, but MacDowell the artist will remain yet awhile. While representative of much that is best in American culture, his choice of subjects and manner of treating his themes may be explained away by reference to his ancestry. The fact of his having sprung from Scottish-Irish parents gives the clue to nearly all his music. There are some men who talk to daisies by the wayside, not because they have anything to say to them, or can understand the language of flowers, but because others pass them by. These people are merely striking an attitude and they are not to be taken too seriously. There also exists the man who stops to address the meanest thing in nature because it holds in its delicate petals a cup of eloquence such as the gods might envy. When we get a man like Burns pouring out his genius upon some everyday theme we feel how full the earth is of splendid beauties and manifold secrets for those who have the faculty of seeing. There is something of this faculty in MacDowell. He is an unique man among modern composers. With the exception of Grieg, no outstanding writer of our time has devoted his musical talent to such short and simple annals. Strauss has a penchant for subjects with a multitude of Interests and a variety of aspects. Take “Ein Heldenleben,” “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” “Tod und Verklarung”; it is all great workmanship upon a large can-

vas. To Strauss nature is not • flower. It is a wide vista of landscape with Zarathustra standing naked on the mountain tops addressing the sun. Debussy, though a quieter spirit, is full of a more studied carelessness and a more artificial naturalness. MacDowell is unaffected in his nature pictures. I have heard it said that when he was composing lie liked to bury himself in the woods, and I can well believe it. Solitude must have had much to say to such a man that words and harmonies would merely have obscured. And the result of the impression made upon him is left in his music. It is natural and it is healthy. There is nothing of fin de siecle, weltschmerz or sehnsucht in his work. This in itself is a great recommendation. MacDowell possesses in a peculiar degree the power of investing common objects with an uncommon interest. Take some of the best known of the piano pieces and you will find this borne out. It is not the landscape alone which interests the composer; it is the hundred fairies which skip over its grassy meads. There as a legend which tells that children can see elfish forms which older people are unable to distinguish. This is only a pretty way of calling attention to the lovely world of childlike happiness. There is much of this in the composer’s music. He revels in little sights and scenes about which others are silent. He is happy in the corner of his flower-garden. Lnfortunately he has had to pay the penalty of his choice of subject. Most of his piano pieces are concerned with things of a far too intimate and fragile nature to be really effective in the concert-hall. This is the reason, I take it, that he is not better known. To those who only frequent the highways of music, MacDowell is but a name. The object of these lines is to point out the interest which surrounds the composer. Hie place of birth, his ancestry, his tastes, all contribute to make him a man worth knowing well. In his “Sea Pieces” we find descriptive sketches which are unlike any other sea pictures in music. In the' “New England Idylls” and ‘’American Wood Idylls” there are numbers full of poetic charm. And the MacDowell of the songs is a delightful companion. These are generally short, but if they be fragmentary they are beautiful fragments. It is in these, I think, that his ScottishIrish ancestry makes itself felt most plainly. The atmosphere is often that of the Western isle, the charm frequently of a Celtic nature. Some of the music possesses the same atmosphere as is to be found in the poetry of Yeats. The picture of the "Glimmering girl With apple blossom in her hair. Who called me by my name, and ran And faded through the brightening air” would sur<y have appealed to the writer of “The Joy of Autumn.” Tn nearly all his work there is a charm. Sometimes it seems as though the voice of the Celt were uppermost, and his pages turftXus to Welsh harpers among the hills and fair ladies in enchanted castles; sometimes there is melody that is Scottish in its character, with just a tinge of melancholy. At others he sketches for us sights and scenes that lie nearer to his home and heart; we find ourselves “at an old trysting place” or brooding upon “the silent mystery of immortal things,” and we feel, as we picture him in his garden at Peterboro’, that in him w» have a man rejoicing m beautiful things, to whom life hi a caravan or in a cottage by the wayside can yield more choice delights than are to be purchased by those who dwell in high places.