His tone is unmistakable.

Its chief possession is a certain clarity and directness which is apparent no less in moments of great stress and complexity of emotion than in passages of simpler and slighter content.

His style has little of the torrential rhetoric, the unbridled gusto and exuberance of Strauss, though it owns something of his forthright quality; nor has it any of Debussy's withdrawals.

One thinks, as a discerning commentator has observed, of the "broad Shakespearian daylight" of Fitzgerald's fine phrase as being not inapplicable to the atmosphere of MacDowell's writing.

He has few reservations, and he shows small liking for recondite effects of harmonic colour, for the wavering melodic line--which is far from implying that he is ever merely obvious or banal: that he never is.
His clarity, his directness, find issue in an order of expression at once lucid and distinguished, at once spontaneous and expressive.