Rosseter Gleason Cole (1866), composer of songs, piano pieces, organ pieces, cantatas and works for orchestra and ’cello, takes his themes from American and general sources. He is organist in Chicago and has charge of the music courses of the summer session of Columbia University. He has held many important posts and taken numerous prizes. His cantata The Rock of Liberty was sung at the Tercentenary Celebration, 1920, of the settlement of Plymouth.
Arne Oldberg, born in Youngstown, Ohio (1874) is director of the piano department of Northwestern University (Michigan) and has many orchestral works, written symphonies, concertos and overtures, which have had frequent hearings. He has also composed much chamber music.
There are also Harry Rowe Shelley (1858), writer of much important church music; James H. Rogers, composer of teaching pieces for the piano and many fine songs, including a cycle In Memoriam, which is a heartfelt expression of sorrow in beautiful music; Wilson G. Smith, composer of many piano teaching pieces and musical writer; Louis Coerne, writer of opera and of works for orchestra; Ernest Kroeger of St. Louis who also used Indian and Negro themes in works for orchestra and piano; Carl Busch of Kansas City, composer of orchestral works, cantatas, music for violin and many songs, in some of which we see the Indian. In California we meet Wm. J. McCoy and Humphrey J. Stewart who have composed church music and have written often for the yearly out-door “High Jinks” of the San Francisco Bohemian Club, in which many important composers have been invited to assist; Domenico Brescia, a South American composer living in San Francisco, who wrote interesting chamber music played at the Berkshire Chamber Music Festivals; and Albert Elkus, a composer of serious works for orchestra and piano. Smith died in 1929; Coerne in 1922.
But this is growing into a musical directory! And even neglecting many who have done much to make music grow in America, we must proceed for we have important milestones ahead.
For many years New York has been the American center of music. Few of the people in musical life are native New Yorkers, but have come from all parts of the States and Europe to this musical Mecca.
MacDowell Greatest American Poet-Composer
The greatest romanticist and poet-composer of America up to the present is Edward MacDowell (1861–1908). Some of the romanticism of the early 19th century has become mere imitation of the style which arose as a protest against the insincere forms of the 18th century. But the true spirit of romance never dies and never becomes artificial,—such romance had MacDowell. He was sincere, always a poet, always himself, and in spite of his Irish-Scotch inheritance, German training and love of Norse legends, he expressed MacDowell in every note. He lived before the time when we question “How shall we express America in Music”? In fact he was much against tagging composers as American, German, French, and so on.
Edward MacDowell, born in New York City, began piano lessons when he was eight. One of his teachers was the brilliant South American Teresa Carreño, who later played her pupil’s concerto with many world orchestras. At 15, he entered the Paris Conservatory where he was fellow student with Debussy.
While there, MacDowell studied French, and during a lesson amused himself by drawing a picture of his teacher. When caught, the teacher, instead of rebuking him, took the sketch to a friend, a master at the École des Beaux Arts, the famous old art school of Paris. The artist found the sketch so good that he offered to train him without charge but Edward had made up his mind to be a musician and did not accept the offer.
In 1879, MacDowell studied composition at Frankfort with Joachim Raff, one of the composers of the Romantic period. Raff introduced him to Liszt, who invited MacDowell to play his first piano suite at Zürich (1882). The composer’s modesty is reflected in these words which Lawrence Gilman quotes: “I would not have changed a note in one of them for untold gold, and inside I had the greatest love for them; but the idea that any one else might take them seriously had never occurred to me.” This suite was his first published composition.