the wave of poetry that produces soul excitement and elevation, from signature to final chord.  While he handles a subject broadly, as an impressionist, accomplishing striking effects with a few bold, characteristic strokes, MacDowell still works out his tone picture with considerable detail, carefully indicating the results he wishes to achieve.  He reminds one in his methods of Corot, the great landscape painter.  He will tell you to play a passage “very tenderly,” or “somewhat savagely,” or “daintily and joyously,” not being content with the usual color terms.  When he is loud, he is very, very loud, and in the same composition will have a passage marked with four p’s.  He likes contrasts and uses them very effectively.  His music has the charm of infinite variety, but there is an insistent note of sombreness pervading most of it that is heard even above the majesty of the “Sea Pieces,” the beauty of the “Woodland Sketches” and the humor of the “Marionettes.”  In the “New England Idyls” there is a plaintive little wail, “From a Log Cabin,” the rustic retreat in the woods at Peterboro, his “house of dreams untold,” where MacDowell did most of his later composition.  It speaks of solitude, isolation and a moan of the wind is heard in the tree tops, with an answering moan from the heart of a man who may have had some premonition of his fate.

He is the first composer of world-note since Brahms who did his best work for the piano.  Others have used that instrument as a means merely, reserving their crowning efforts for the orchestra, where it is, of course, far less difficult to achieve fine effects.  While he wrote successful orchestral suites, he dignified the single instrument by devoting his first thought to piano literature.

His humorous suite, “The Marionettes,” very strongly suggests Jerome K. Jerome’s “Stageland,” in which the villain is represented as an individual who always wears a clean collar and smokes a cigarette.  The hero approaches the heroine from the rear and “breathes his attachment down her back,” and the poor heroine is pursued by the relentless storm, while on the other side of the street the sun is shining.  MacDowell portrays the coquettish “Soubrette,” the longing “Lover,” the strong-charactered “Witch,” the gay “Clown,” the sinister “Villain” and the simple, tender “Sweetheart,” with a Prologue indicating “sturdy good humor” and an Epilogue to be rendered “musingly, with deep feeling.”  The suite is very attractive and in sharp contrast to his romantic, heroic and lyric work.

Another potent factor in the formation of MacDowell’s style of composition was his love of nature.  No one has put truer brooks, birds, flowers, trees, meadows or sea into tone.  Whenever he “loafed and invited his soul,” the tired, city-worn world reaped the benefit.  His lesser piano compositions may be, in a sense, considered in the light of a diary.  We are with him in a fisherman’s hut, in deep woods, on a deserted farm, in the haunted house, by the lily pond, in mid-ocean, by a meadow brook, by smoldering embers, always seeing the picture, hearing the voices or feeling the atmosphere that appealed to his artist mind.  The charm of common things, the ever-present beauty and harmony in all forms of life, supplied him with endless inspiration.