Detail from "Edward MacDowell, ca. 1903." Gelatin silver print. A.P. Schmidt Company Archives, Music Division, Library of Congress.
The following is a guest post by Senior Music Specialist Robin Rausch.
The weekend of December 3-5, I participated in a MacDowell Festival & Symposium at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, to commemorate the 150th birthday (on December 18th) of the distinguished American composer Edward MacDowell. MacDowell is generally acknowledged to be the first American composer to earn international acclaim. But his music has long been considered passé, a relic of a different age. If the Elizabethtown festival is any indication, that is about to change. A reassessment of Edward MacDowell, both the man and his music, is underway.
MacDowell’s ideas about the interrelatedness of the fine arts and their place in academia met resistance during his troubled tenure at Columbia University from 1896 to 1904. Today the fine arts are well ensconced in college and university curricula across the United States, and interdisciplinary arts programs have become popular. Edward MacDowell was a man ahead of his time.
MacDowell’s beliefs found further expression in the establishment of an artists’ colony on his New Hampshire farm. Founded in 1907 by his wife Marian in fulfillment of the composer’s dying wishes—MacDowell died the following year—The MacDowell Colony is now the gold standard among artist colonies. In 2007, The Library of Congress partnered with the Colony to mark its centennial anniversary with an exhibition: A Century of Creativity: The MacDowell Colony 1907-2007.
The Library of Congress is home to both the Edward and Marian MacDowell Collection and the Records of the MacDowell Colony.
So dust off those copies of Woodland Sketches, and play a little “To a Wild Rose” in honor of Edward MacDowell and his lasting artistic legacy to America.