[Music.]

We may find the significance of this in the fact that it is a prominent figure of the Dirge, No. 4 of the suite.  The active figure is now heard again, deep and almost inaudible, softly ushering in the barbaric opening theme, now heard in the bass.  The warriors appear to be returning as the music once more grows in volume.  Wilder and wilder it grows—­a moment’s silence—­only to begin again faster and faster.  Still faster does it become until it is almost a scream, the conclusion coming in a magnificent series of reiterated chords thundered out with the full strength of the orchestra employed.  There is no doubt that this piece is one of the most vividly imaginative and brilliant in the whole range of orchestral music, although it is rarely performed with the skill and insight it requires.

4. Dirge (Dirge-like, mournfully).  “Of all my music,” said MacDowell after his last music had been published, “the Dirge in the Indian Suite pleases me most.  It affects me deeply and did when I was writing it.  In it an Indian woman laments the death of her son; but to me, as I wrote it, it seemed to express a world-sorrow rather than a particularised grief.”  The piece is undoubtedly one of its composer’s most melancholy utterances.  Under a long series of reiterated key notes of the tonic minor, the wailing phrase heard in In War Time (No. 3 of the suite) appears:—­

[Music.]

It goes on at some length with increasing sadness and richer harmonic and instrumental colouring (indescribable is the effect of a muted horn heard off the platform).  Soon comes a deep and solemn bass uttering, heart-shaking in its grief.  We give it with the passage leading up to it:—­

[Music.]

After a while the music rises with the same lonely mournfulness to an outburst of despair:—­

[Music.]

The sad opening phase follows and after this the solemn bass figure.  The close is mysterious but piercing in its sobbing, inconsolable grief.

[Music.]

This Dirge is indisputably the cry of a great soul, and there is little in music which expresses grief so effectively.  The sense it gives of loneliness and sombreness has never been quite equalled by any other composer.  The piece is not a funeral oration weighed down with pomp, but the spontaneous grief of elemental humanity.  The scene is of a mother mourning for her son; its significance is of a world sorrow.  The music would honour any composer, living or dead.

5. Village Festival (Swift and light).  This number is the longest of the Suite.  It opens with the tune of a squaws’ dance of the Iroquois Indians:—­

[Music.]

This is soon followed by another of festivity:—­

[Music.]

The music proceeds, rich in harmonic and instrumental colouring, and vividly suggesting the wild orgies of the village festivities of the Red Indians.  The whole works up to frenzied power until exhaustion comes and it dies down again.  Indicated as slightly broader, the opening tune is now heard softly over mysterious tremolos.  Particularly subdued is the wild and sombre after thought:—­