SUMMARY To gain a true sense of MacDowell's place in American music it is necessary to remember that twenty-five years ago, when he sent from Germany, as the fruit of his apprenticeship there, the earliest outgivings of his talent, our native musical art was still little more than a pallid reproduction of European models.

MacDowell did not at that time, of course, give positive evidence of the vitality and the rarity of his gifts; yet there was, even in his early music,--undeniably immature though it was, and modelled after easily 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.