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.