1860–1908 · United States
Edward MacDowell (1860–1908) was an American pianist and composer, born and died in New York City. He studied in Paris and Germany, and in 1896 was named Columbia University's first music professor. For players, the heart of his legacy is the piano suites, such as Woodland Sketches with the piece To a Wild Rose.
Edward MacDowell came into the world in New York on December 18, 1860. His family were Quakers of Irish and Scottish descent, and his father sold milk. The boy's first piano teacher was Juan Buitrago, a Colombian violinist then lodging in the MacDowell household. Later he also studied music with friends of Buitrago, among them the Cuban pianist Pablo Desverine.
His mother decided to take him to Paris, where he was admitted to the conservatoire on a scholarship won in competition among foreign students. He spent two years in the class of Antoine François Marmontel and stood at the top of it, and Claude Debussy studied in the same piano class. He studied theory with Marie Gabriel Savard.
His dissatisfaction with the French school of piano playing reached its peak after he heard Nikolai Rubinstein play Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto. MacDowell left Paris for Germany. His piano teachers were Sigmund Levi in Stuttgart, Louis Ehlert in Wiesbaden and Carl Heymann at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt.
Joachim Raff taught him composition. At a student concert attended by two visitors to the school, Franz Liszt and Clara Schumann, MacDowell performed the Quintet by Robert Schumann (Op. 44) and a Liszt symphonic poem in transcription.
After finishing his studies MacDowell stayed in Germany and taught piano in Darmstadt, including at Schmitt's academy. He visited Liszt in Weimar and played him works of his own. Liszt suggested that the General German Music Association perform the First Modern Suite (Op. 10) by MacDowell, and introduced him to the Leipzig publishers Breitkopf & Härtel.
Liszt's approval led to MacDowell's first publishing contracts and led him to switch to a composer's career. In 1884 he married an American, Marian Griswold Nevins, who had studied piano with him in Frankfurt for three years. The couple settled in Frankfurt to begin with, later moved to Darmstadt, and ended up in Wiesbaden. Between 1885 and 1888 he gave himself almost entirely to writing music, and he returned to the United States in autumn 1888.
Boston became their new home. MacDowell first appeared there on November 19, 1888, at a concert with the Kneisel Quartet, and he gained a reputation on the concert stage and as a teacher. He played in concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and of other American musical organisations, and the orchestra also played his works. The family lived in Boston until 1896.
In 1896 Columbia University appointed MacDowell professor of music, the first person to hold a music professorship there. Seth Low, the university's president, asked him personally to build a music department. MacDowell taught at Columbia until 1904, and from 1896 to 1898 he also directed the Mendelssohn Glee Club and wrote some pieces for it.
He was also a well-known teacher of piano and composition. Among his pupils were James Dunn, E. Ray Goetz and Frances Tarbox, John Pierce Langs, who became a close friend, and the linguist Edward Sapir.
Princeton University gave him an honorary doctorate in music in 1896. In 1899 he was elected president of a New York body for American musicians and composers. In 1904 he was among the seven founding members of the Academy of Arts and Letters in America.
In 1896 Marian MacDowell bought Hillcrest Farm in Peterborough, New Hampshire, as a summer home for the family. In the countryside MacDowell's creativity flourished. His output includes a pair of piano concertos, a pair of orchestral suites, four symphonic poems and four piano sonatas, along with piano suites and songs. Besides these, he published dozens of piano transcriptions, mostly of eighteenth-century keyboard pieces written before the piano existed.
As a professor MacDowell often felt under strain: administrative duties weighed on him, and so did a dispute with the university's new president, Nicholas Murray Butler. They disagreed over two required fine-arts courses for all undergraduates and over a single combined department that would unite music, sculpture, painting and the comparative study of literature. Butler stripped the arts faculty of their votes on academic affairs and charged MacDowell with unprofessional conduct and poor teaching. In February 1904 the composer suddenly announced that he was leaving, and a public controversy followed.
Once he had left the university, MacDowell sank into depression and his health quickly failed. The mental illness that struck him in 1904 forced him to give up all creative work. An accident the same year, when a cab knocked him down on Broadway, may also have played a part in his psychiatric disorder and the dementia that followed.
His friends started a public appeal to pay for his care, and the Mendelssohn Glee Club also raised money. Signatories included Horatio Parker, Victor Herbert, Andrew Carnegie and ex-president Grover Cleveland. Marian MacDowell nursed her husband until he died. In 1907 the couple handed Hillcrest Farm to the newly formed Edward MacDowell Association, and so the artists' colony now called MacDowell came into being.
The composer died in New York City on January 23, 1908, and was buried at Hillcrest Farm, which he loved. The colony kept going after his death, with Marian MacDowell at the head of the association and the colony for over a quarter of a century.
The centre of MacDowell's legacy is the piano. For the instrument alone he wrote four sonatas, the Tragica, Eroica, Norse and Keltic (composed from 1893 to 1901). Of his suites, the weightiest are the pair of Modern Suites (1883), Woodland Sketches (1896), Sea Pieces (1898) and New England Idylls (1902). Within Woodland Sketches is the short piece he is best known for, To a Wild Rose. There are also many small pieces, some of which appeared under the pseudonym Edgar Thorn. He also brought out two volumes of technical exercises for pianists.
Two of his piano concertos (1885 and 1890) also mattered for American music. The Second Orchestral Suite (1897), known as the Indian Suite, was one of the first attempts to work with Native American folk music. MacDowell also wrote songs for voice and piano and choral works.
The First Piano Concerto, written in 1885 and set in A minor, appeared in print as Op. 15; its three movements are Maestoso — Allegro con fuoco; then Andante tranquillo; then Presto. His Second Concerto is especially well known. Today both concertos are regarded as the most important works of their kind by an American composer, if Gershwin is set aside.
For orchestra he also wrote the First Suite (1891–1893) and two fragments drawn from the Song of Roland (1891), and for voice and piano several song cycles, among them From an Old Garden (1887) and Eight Songs (1893). His choral music is written for male and mixed voices.
After his death MacDowell was seen as a great American composer with an international name. Later, as the twentieth century went on, his fame was overshadowed by Roy Harris, Charles Ives and Aaron Copland. In the twenty-first century his legacy began to be assessed afresh. He entered the national Classical Music Hall of Fame on February 14, 2000, and the four sonatas, the two orchestral suites and many piano pieces continue to be played and recorded.
On the site, all of MacDowell's scores are at one level, Intermediate+. The list begins with Woodland Sketches (Op. 51) and Sea Pieces (Op. 55), New England Idyls (Op. 62), the Second Modern Suite, Op. 14, and the First Modern Suite, the collections Fireside Tales, Op. 61, and Forgotten Fairytales, Op. 4, four sonatas (Op. 49, 50, 57 and 59), Twelve Etudes, Op. 39, and Twelve Virtuoso Etudes, as well as Etude de Concert, Op. 36, Serenata, Op. 16, Marionettes, Op. 38, and Czardas, Op. 24. You can begin with the collections Woodland Sketches and Forgotten Fairytales.