recognised Teutonic masters,--a fresh and untrammelled impulse. A new
note vibrated through it, a new and buoyant personality suffused it.
Thenceforth music in America possessed an artistic figure of
constantly increasing stature. MacDowell commanded, from the start,
an original idiom, a manner of speech which has been recognised even
by his detractors as entirely his own.

His style is as pungent and unmistakable as Grieg's, and far less
limited in its variety. Hearing certain melodic turns, certain
harmonic formations, you recognise them at once as belonging to
MacDowell, and to none other. This marked individuality of speech,
apparent from the first, became constantly more salient and more
vivid, and in the music which he gave forth at the height of his
creative activity,--in, say, the "Sea Pieces" and the last two
sonatas,--it is unmistakable and beyond dispute. This emphatically
personal accent it was which, a score of years ago, set MacDowell in a
place apart among native American music-makers. No one else was saying
such charming and memorable things in so fresh and individual a way.
We had then, as we have had since, composers who were entitled to
respect by virtue of their expert and effective mastery of a familiar
order of musical expression,--who spoke correctly a language acquired
in the schools of Munich, Leipzig, and Berlin. But they had nothing to
say that was both important and new. They had grace, they had
dexterity, they had, in a measure, scholarship; but their art was
obviously derivative, without originality of substance or a telling
quality of style. It is not a needlessly harsh asseveration to say
that, until MacDowell began to put forth his more individual works,
our music had been palpably, almost frankly, dependent: an undisguised
and naïve transplantation, made rather feeble and anæmic in the
process, of European growths. The result was admirable, in its way,