lock him in a room for hours till he had worked out the most
appalling musical problems. Through Raff's influence he became first
piano teacher at the Darmstadt Conservatorium in 1881. The next year
Raff introduced him to Liszt, who became so enthusiastic over his
compositions that he got him the honor of playing his first piano
suite before the formidable _Allgemeiner Deutscher Musik Verein_,
which accorded him a warm reception. The following years were spent in
successful concert work, till 1884, when MacDowell settled down to
teaching and composing in Wiesbaden. Four years later he came to
Boston, writing, teaching, and giving occasional concerts. Thence he
returned to New York, where he was called to the professorship of
music at Columbia University. Princeton University has given him that
unmusical degree, Mus. Doc.

MacDowell has met little or none of that critical recalcitrance that
blocked the early success of so many masters. His works succeeded from
the first in winning serious favor; they have been much played in
Germany, in Vienna, St. Petersburg, Amsterdam, and Paris, one of them
having been performed three times in a single season at Breslau.

MacDowell's Scotch ancestry is always telling tales on him. The
"Scotch snap" is a constant rhythmic device, the old scale and the old
Scottish cadences seem to be native to his heart. Perhaps one might
find some kinship between MacDowell and the contemporary Glasgow
school of painters, that clique so isolated, so daring, and yet so
earnest and solid. Says James Huneker in a monograph published some
years ago: "His coloring reminds me at times of Grieg, but when I
tracked the resemblance to its lair, I found only Scotch, as Grieg's
grand-folk were Greggs, and from Scotland. It is all Northern music
with something elemental in it, and absolutely free from the heavy,
languorous odors of the South or the morbidezza of Poland."

Some of MacDowell's most direct writing has been in the setting of the
poems of Burns, such as "Deserted" ("Ye banks and braes o' bonnie
Doon," op. 9), "Menie," and "My Jean" (op. 34). These are strongly
marked by that ineffably fine melodic flavor characteristic of
Scottish music, while in the accompaniments they admit a touch of the
composer's own individuality. In his accompaniments it is noteworthy
that he is almost never strictly contramelodic.

The songs of opera 11 and 12 have a decided Teutonism, but he has
found himself by opus 40,