[13] The "Tragica" sonata, op. 45, which antedates the suite by
several years, and of which I shall write in another chapter, has a
considerably less definite content.

In the suite as a whole he has caught and embodied the fundamental
spirit of his theme: these are the sorrows and laments and rejoicings,
not of our own day and people, but of the vanished life of an
elemental and dying race; here is the solitude of dark forests, of
illimitable and lonely prairies, and the sombreness and wildness of
one knows not what grim tragedies and romances and festivities enacted
in the shadow of a fading past.

Into the discussion of the relation between such works as the "Indian"
suite and the establishment of a possible "American" school of music I
shall not intrude. To those of us who believe that such a "school,"
whether desirable or not, can never be created through conscious
effort, and who are entirely willing to permit time and circumstance
to bring about its establishment, the subject is as wearisome as it is
unprofitable. The logic of the belief that it is possible to achieve a
representative nationalism in music by the ingenuous process of
adopting the idiom of an alien though neighbouring race is not
immediately apparent; and although MacDowell in this suite has
admittedly derived his basic material from the North American
aborigines, he never, so far as I am aware, claimed that his
impressive and noble score constitutes, for that reason, a
representatively national utterance. He perceived, doubtless, that
territorial propinquity is quite a different thing from racial
affinity; and that a musical art derived from either Indian or
Ethiopian sources can be "American" only in a partial and quite
unimportant sense. He recognised, and he affirmed the belief, that