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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.
 In 1884, he married Miss Marian Nevins of New York, and theirs
was one of the most beautiful marriages in musical history, although
their meeting was amusing! The young girl had crossed the ocean to
continue her music studies at a time when it was not a common
occurrence, and when she went to Raff for lessons, he sent her to a
young countryman of hers, “an extraordinary piano teacher.” She
was indignant to be sent to a young inexperienced American in that
fashion, but she went! The young inexperienced American did not
want to teach an American girl, because he felt she would not be
serious enough to do the kind of work he demanded, but he accepted
her! Later she accepted him!

Edward MacDowell.

America’s Greatest Poet-Composer.

 Charles Griffes.

American Impressionist.

In 1888, he established himself in Boston as pianist and teacher.

His first concert was with the Kneisel Quartet, and in 1889 he
successfully played his concerto with the Boston Symphony
Orchestra. He made tours through the States giving recitals and
appearing with the orchestras. Winning immediate recognition, his
position as an exceptional composer grew. In 1896 the Boston
Symphony Orchestra presented his first piano concerto and his
orchestral Indian Suite on the same program in New York. Such an
honor had never before been shown an American!
In 1896, he became professor of the new Chair of Music at
Columbia University in New York City. After resigning his post in
1904, his health broke as the result of an accident, and for several
years he was an invalid. All the care of physicians, devoted friends,
his parents, and his courageous wife, could not restore his memory,
and in 1908, he died in New York and was buried in Peterboro, N. H.
A natural boulder from where he often watched the sunset, marks
the spot—fitting for one who loved Nature as he did.
Shortly before his passing, a group of friends formed a society, the
MacDowell Club of New York, which has for its object the promoting
of “a sympathetic understanding of the correlation of all the arts, and
of contributing to the broadening of their influence, thus carrying
forward the life-purpose of Edward MacDowell.” He wished
musicians to know the value of associating with artists outside of the
field of music. Eugene Heffley, (1862–1925) an intimate friend of
MacDowell and first president of the MacDowell Club did much to
make the MacDowell music known and loved, just as he did for
Charles Griffes, Debussy, Ravel, Scriabin and others who have come
with new messages.
Some people have statues erected, others have towns and streets
named for them, but besides the numerous MacDowell Clubs
throughout the States, the most beautiful memorial is the MacDowell
Association at Peterboro. Early in his career, MacDowell found it
impossible to work well in the city, and by happy chance he and his
wife discovered a deserted farm which they bought for the proverbial
“song.” Here the composer spent his summers in the beautiful New
Hampshire woods, in the heart of which he built the little log cabin,
which in his words, is
A house of dreams untold
It looks out over the whispering tree-tops
And faces the setting sun.

And in this “house” he told many of his dreams in lovely melody!

While ill, he often expressed the desire to share the inspiration-
giving peace and beauty of his woods with friends, workers in music
and the sister arts. Out of this wish has grown the colony for creative
workers, which has been a haven to hundreds of composers, poets,
painters, sculptors, dramatists, and novelists. The “Log Cabin” is the
seed out of which twenty studios have sprung. The small deserted
farm has spread over 500 acres, and Mrs. MacDowell with the aid of
faithful friends has made a dream come true!
MacDowell was a composer for the pianoforte, although he wrote
some lovely songs; a few orchestral works, best known of which is
The Indian Suite, in which he employs Indian themes; and several
male choruses written when he conducted the New York
Mendelssohn Glee Club. We love and remember him for his
Woodland Sketches, Sea Pieces, Fireside Tales, New England Idyls
(opus 62 and his last work), virtuoso-studies, and the four sonatas—
the Tragica, Eroica, Norse and Keltic.
W. H. Humiston (1869–1924), composer, lecturer, musical critic,
organist, assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic
Orchestra and a pupil of MacDowell, had the most complete
collection of Bach and Wagner in this country and was a great
authority on their writings. This collection now belongs to the
MacDowell Association, and is in the colony library at Peterboro.
 Henry Holden Huss

Henry Holden Huss (1862), born in Newark, New Jersey, has lived
in New York since his early twenties when he returned from studying
with Rheinberger in Munich. Before his European days he was a
pupil of his father, George J. Huss, a Bavarian who came to America
during the 1848 revolution, and was one of the best musical
educators in this country. Huss also studied with O. B. Boise (1845–
1912), an American theorist and teacher. As concert pianist, Huss has
played his piano concerto, one of the best American works, with all
the important orchestras. Raoul Pugno, the much-loved French
pianist, and Adele aus der Ohe also played it abroad and in America.
Huss has always aimed for the highest ideals as teacher, composer
and pianist. A classicist at heart, his works are written on classic
models,—a beautiful violin sonata with poetic slow movement, many
chamber music works, a concerto for violin and orchestra, besides
The Seven Ages of Man for baritone and orchestra, often sung by the
late David Bispham, Cleopatra’s Death, for soprano and orchestra, a
female chorus Ave Maria, and many fine art songs and piano pieces,
the most beautiful of which is a tone poem To the Night, a lovely
impressionistic composition that ranks with the best that America
has produced.
Two other pupils of O. B. Boise, Ernest Hutcheson (1871) an
Australian, and Howard Brockway (1870), a Brooklynite, have done
much to make music grow in America. Hutcheson, who studied also
with Max Vogrich in Australia and Reinecke in Leipsic, has made so
enviable a career as pianist and teacher, that one forgets he has a
symphony, a double piano concerto and several other large works in
manuscript. Brockway, who harmonized Lonesome Tunes, folk songs
from the Kentucky Mountains collected by Miss Loraine Wyman, is
also the composer of a symphony played in Boston (1907) by the
Symphony Orchestra, a suite, ballad-scherzo for orchestra, many
piano works and songs. Hutcheson, Brockway and Boise were
teachers in the Baltimore Peabody Institute, one of the important
music schools, under direction of Harold Randolph, a fine musician
and pianist.
 George F. Boyle (1886) of New South Wales has, since 1910, been
professor at the Peabody Institute. He has composed many piano
pieces, songs and orchestral works.
 Rubin Goldmark

Rubin Goldmark (1872), is known as the best toastmaster in the

music world! Born in New York, he was one of Dvorak’s most
talented pupils and inherits his gifts from his noted uncle Carl
Goldmark (1830–1915), a Hungarian composer of the overture
Sakuntala and the opera The Queen of Sheba, the symphony The
Rustic Wedding and much else. Rubin Goldmark has written several
important tone poems,—Samson, Gettysburg Requiem, Negro
Rhapsody, based on negro themes, and other fine things for
orchestra, chamber music, piano and violin numbers and as a
teacher he has laid the foundations for several American composers
among whom are:—Frederick Jacobi, Aaron Copland and George
Gershwin. Each score from Goldmark’s pen is an addition to
American music.
 Henry Hadley

Henry K. Hadley (1871) by right of birth and training belongs to

the New England group of composers, but most of his life was spent
in Germany where he got his orchestral experience, and in different
parts of America where he has conducted orchestras—Seattle,
Washington, San Francisco and New York. Hadley is one of the few
Americans who has conducted the New York Philharmonic
Orchestra.
Hadley has taken many prizes for opera, symphony, cantata and
an orchestral rhapsody. To this he has added numerous other
orchestral and chamber music works and over 100 songs.
 Albert Mildenberg’s “Michael Angelo”

In these days when the cry is for American opera, it seems

regrettable that an opera ready for production should lie idle because
of the death of its composer. Perhaps no work in history has had a
more tragic story than Michael Angelo by Albert Mildenberg (1878–
1918). In 1908, Mildenberg signed a contract in Vienna for the
production of the opera. The following year on the way to Europe,
the ship, Slavonia, was wrecked, and although the composer
escaped, his entire orchestral score and parts went to the bottom of
the sea. Courageously he rewrote the work, and sent it to the
Metropolitan Opera House in competition for the $10,000 prize,
won by Horatio Parker. Before it had reached the judges, in some
way, still unexplained, the major part of the score disappeared!
Again, Mildenberg set to work with the sketches he had, and made a
third score, but it cost him his life, for though the opera was
completed before his death, he was too ill to carry it further.
In addition to this grand opera, Mildenberg, a pupil of Rafael
Joseffy, wrote many piano pieces. He also composed The Violet, I
Love Thee, and Astarte, songs that had a popular vogue and are still
found on many programs, and romantic comic operas, The Wood
Witch and Love’s Locksmith, besides a cantata and many choruses.
Two other operas which had Metropolitan Opera House
productions were The Temple Dancer by John Adam Hugo (1873)
and The Legend by Joseph Carl Breil (1870).
 John Alden Carpenter—Modernist

John Alden Carpenter (1876), one of America’s foremost

composers, was born in Park Ridge, Illinois, and educated at
Harvard where he took the music course, studying afterwards in
England with Edward Elgar, the English composer. A business man,
Carpenter still devotes his time to composing music that has put him
among America’s leading musical lights. While he might be called a
romanticist, his tendencies are impressionistic, and none
understands better than he the charms of rich and unusual
harmonies, the use of modern melodic and orchestral effects, and the
value of humor in music. All these we find in his Adventures in a
Perambulator for orchestra, and his ballet Krazy Kat, where jazz
rhythms are used to great advantage. One of the most beautiful
works of its kind, is the ballet after Oscar Wilde’s The Birthday of the
Infanta, performed by the Chicago Opera Company, and his first
ballet written for the Metropolitan Opera Company is called
Skyscraper, certainly American! Carpenter’s settings of Tagore’s
Gitanjali are among America’s finest songs; he has many others, a
concertino for piano and orchestra and a violin sonata.
 An All-American Symphony

Eric Delamarter (1880), born in Lansing, Michigan, has written a

Symphony After Walt Whitman in which he has used twenty-year
old street songs from the “Barbary Coast” (San Francisco Bowery),
Lonesome Tunes of Kentucky, and a fox-trot rhythm with newer
street songs. These, Delamarter has woven into a symphony with
skill and sincerity. The material is All-American although neither
Negro nor Indian.
Delamarter is a well-known musical critic in Chicago, an organist,
composer of many other works for orchestra, organ, and oratorios,
incidental music for drama, cantatas and songs and since 1917
assistant conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Noble Kreider and Edward Royce, son of Professor Josiah Royce of
Harvard University, have both written well for the piano. Harold
Bauer has played variations and short pieces by Edward Royce.
 Ernest Schelling—Pianist-Composer

Ernest Schelling (1876), born in Delaware, New Jersey, appeared

as pianist at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, at the age of four!
His musical training abroad included several years with Paderewski.
He has made many concert tours in Europe and America, and for two
seasons has conducted the children’s concerts of the New York
Philharmonic Society. His important orchestral works include a
symphonic legend, a suite, two numbers, Suite Phantastique and
Impressions From An Artist’s Life, for piano and orchestra, and his
latest work to enjoy wide popularity, The Victory Ball.
 John Powell—Virginian

All the charm and refinement of the Southern gentleman are

reflected in John Powell’s personality, along with an earnest sincerity
and conviction. He was born in Richmond, Virginia, (1882), is a
graduate of the University of Virginia, and a pupil of Theodor
Leschetizky and Navratil in Vienna. He has made an international
reputation as brilliant pianist and is also one of our most gifted
composers. Powell’s works show classical training in form, with
which he combines a rich romantic feeling and a love for folk music.
He believes that music should draw on the folk element for its
strength, and has proved his theory by using freely the folk music he
knows best, that of the negro. In the South, At the Fair, piano pieces,
show this early influence and his fund of humor, and in his Negro
Rhapsody for piano and orchestra, Powell has painted a picture of
the negro in many moods—sinister and menacing, primitive
bordering on barbaric, as well as humorous, care-free and childlike.
His Sonata Teutonica which first brought him before the public is
of extraordinary strength, length and talent. He has written other
sonatas for piano and for violin, songs, chamber music and
orchestral works.
 Negro Spirituals versus Jazz

This brings us face to face with one of the most discussed

questions of the day: the influence of Negro music and jazz on
serious composition. The pure Negro music is the Spiritual and not
jazz, which may be the typically American idiom we have been
waiting for.
It is not Negro but is developed from the Negro dance rhythm,
from a real folk music; it is the result of Negro music played upon by
American life and influences; through it we may learn to free
ourselves musically, and show the true American spirit of adventure
and daring which until now has been absent in our native
compositions. The path has been travelled from the songs of Stephen
Foster, Negro Minstrels, “coon songs” and “cake walks,” to jazz with
its elaborate orchestration unlike any other existing music, and its
complicated rhythms. Jazz rhythm is contrapuntal rhythm. Europe
says that it is our one original and important contribution to music!
This is a strong statement, but as “imitation is the sincerest form of
flattery,” their serious 20th century composers have flattered us by
writing jazz, and we have Piano Rag by Stravinsky, a Syncopated
Sonata by Jean Wiener, jazz by Darius Milhaud, Casella, Honegger,
and even Debussy was tempted into writing Golliwogg’s Cake Walk.
In Los Angeles (April, 1925), Walter Henry Rothwell with his
Philharmonic Orchestra played an American Caprice by Henry
Schoenefeld (1857) one of many works in which the composer has
used Indian and Negro themes.
 Henry Thacker Burleigh, Most Noted Colored
Composer

His arrangement of the Spiritual, Deep River, has made Harry

Burleigh’s name known on two continents, and its success has led
many into that field. Burleigh (1866) was one of the foremost among
the Dvorak pupils, and has held the position of leading baritone in
St. George’s Church for many years, as also at the Temple Emanuel
on Fifth Avenue. His name is found on practically every program
where Spirituals are sung.
Of Burleigh’s race is R. Nathaniel Dett (1882), conductor of the
Hampton Singers, also director of the music department of Hampton
College. His name was introduced by Percy Grainger, who played his
characteristic Negro dance called Juba Dance in Europe and
America. Dett’s greatest works are his arrangements of the Spirituals
for chorus. Grainger wrote of him: “There is in his treatment of
blended human voices that innate sonority and vocal naturalness
that seem to result only from accumulated long experience of
untrained improvised polyphonic singing, such as that of Southern
Negroes, South Sea Polynesians and Russian peasants. These things
are branches of the very tree of natural communal song.”
David Guion, a young Texan, is well known in this field and also
for his piano setting of Turkey in the Straw.
 Louis Gruenberg Finds New Paths

Louis Gruenberg (1884) was born in Russia but came to America

at the age of two. At nineteen he went to Europe and became the
pupil of Ferruccio Busoni, the Italian pianist-composer who spent
most of his life in Berlin and Vienna and also taught for two years at
the New England Conservatory of Music.
Gruenberg had followed conventional lines of composition for
some years, receiving prizes in Berlin and New York (in 1922 he was
awarded the Flagler prize for a symphonic poem Hill of Dreams). His
works of this period comprise symphonic poems, a string quartet, a
piano concerto, a symphony, a suite for violin, also a sonata, two
operas, songs and piano pieces.
He began to study America, to ask himself what was the spirit of
Americanism that had not yet found its way into music, and his
answer was not the Negro jazz, but the white man’s jazz expressing
the “spirit of the times.” As a result he changed his way of writing.
The compositions of this period are a violin sonata, a set of piano
pieces called Polychromatics, a Poem in sonatina form for ’cello, four
pieces for string quartet, a viola sonata, an orchestral tone-poem, a
group of short piano pieces in jazz rhythms with the amusing name
of Jazzberries, three violin pieces in the same style, a group of songs
Animals and Insects, texts by Vachel Lindsay, and that same poet’s
Daniel which Gruenberg has set as Daniel Jazz for tenor and
chamber music orchestra, and Creation, a Negro sermon by James
Weldon Johnson, a poet, who has just won the Spingarn Prize for the
most distinctive work (1924–1925) of an American of African
descent.
 Two Jazz Geniuses

Irving Berlin, the genius of the age in writing typical American

jazz, was born in Russia and has had no musical training. He picks
out his irresistible melodies by ear and his aide writes them down to
the delight of the millions in all corners of the earth, from New York
to the Sahara desert, where the phonograph has carried them. The
sheiks no longer sing in ancient pentatonic melody to their lady
loves, but turn on the phonograph which ably plays some of his
hundred American songs: My Wife Goes to the Country, Snooky
Ookums, Along Came Ruth, If You Don’t Want Me Why Do You
Hang Around? Mandy, Say it with Music, What’ll I Do, All Alone,
and many from the musical revues (Music Box Revue, especially).
His earlier Alexander’s Rag Time Band goes back to cake walk days
and has become a classic of its kind and the model for popular music
following it. He rose from poverty to riches through giving great
delight to the public.
George Gershwin (1898) flashed into the lime-light through his
jazz piano concerto Rhapsody in Blue and his extraordinary playing
of it with Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra. In this piece we find a merging
of classic form with the “voice of the people”! It will be interesting to
watch this young man, not yet thirty, to see the outcome of grafting a
musical education on to his unusual natural gifts. As a result of the
success of his experiment he has been commissioned to write a New
York Concerto for the New York Symphony. He is a Brooklyn boy
brought up as a “song plugger” for a publisher of popular music,
playing their songs in vaudeville acts and in cafés.
 Charles Tomlinson Griffes

Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884–1920) was a poet-composer

whose early death was a serious loss to America, for every thing he
wrote was an addition to our music. He was impressionistic in style,
and we are grateful for the lovely art songs, Five Poems of Ancient
China and Japan, three songs with orchestral accompaniment to
poems of Fiona MacLeod, ten piano pieces and the Sonata which
have never been surpassed in beauty and workmanship by any
American, the Poem for flute and orchestra, the string quartet on
Indian themes, and his orchestral tone-poem, The Pleasure Dome of
Kubla Khan. For the stage, Griffes composed a Japanese mime-play,
Schojo, a dance drama, The Kairn of Korwidwen and Walt
Whitman’s Salut au Monde, a dramatic ballet. The last two were
presented at the Neighborhood Playhouse, where interesting
experiments in music and the drama have been made by the Misses
Lewisohn.
Griffes was a native of Elmira, New York, and his first studies were
made with Miss Mary S. Broughton, who recognized her young
pupil’s unusual talent and took him to Germany for study. His
composition work was done with Humperdinck, and Rüfer, and from
1907 until his death he taught music at Hackley, a boys’ school in
Tarrytown, New York.
Lawrence Gilman, American critic, says of him: “He was a poet
with a sense of comedy.... Griffes had never learned how to pose—he
would never have learned how if he had lived to be as triumphantly
old and famous as Monsieur Saint-Saëns or Herr Bruch or Signor
Verdi.... It was only a short while before his death that the Boston
Symphony Orchestra played for the first time (in Boston) his
Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan ... and the general concert-going
public turned aside ... to bestow an approving hand upon this
producer of a sensitive and imaginative tone-poetry who was by
some mysterious accident, an American!... He was a fastidious
craftsman, a scrupulous artist. He was neither smug nor pretentious
nor accommodating. He went his own way,—modestly, quietly,
unswervingly ... having the vision of the few....”