nk that the negro melodies should form the basis of our
American music; but why? The negro is an importation, not a native,
and if we want the real thing, it seems to me that we will have to
find it in the Indian melodies, but it will take artistic handling to
develop them from aboriginal simplicity to the intricacy necessary to
represent in any sense present-day, cosmopolitan America.

Universality is just now the philosophical ideal, and it seems to me
that America, the composite nation, is the proper center from which
such a spirit should emanate. Why try to foster the limited local idea
with regard to music, or any artistic or intellectual pursuit? Why
encourage the production of distinctive American music in a country in
which there is not even a distinctive type of face or mode of speech?
Here is a Virginian, descended from an American Indian and an English
colonist, living next door to a Plymouth Rock Yankee whose husband is
a French Canadian. Across the street is a German-American born in the
Middle West, who is married to a Californian of Spanish lineage. My
cook is an African, yours is Chinese and perhaps your housemaid is
Scandinavian, your chauffeur Irish, and so on. Music, to be effective
in such a patchwork civilization as this, would have to be _simply
music_--universal, composite, international.

MacDowell has created a typical music, typical of _himself_, not of
any locality, and he wished it to be judged as _music_, not as
_American_ music, and the justice of his desire cannot be gainsaid.
Recalling all of the influences of inherited and natural temperament,
education, foreign environment and American experience, jealous as we
are of his genius, we must admit that he caught in his productions the
complexity of his time. His music is universal and reflects the genius
of his contemporaries, as well as that of the older masters,
impregnated with his individual creativeness. He had seeing eyes and
hearing ears, and realizing the eternal principle of rhythm and the
universality of tone, he caught the keynote of everything related to
him in the outer world, with its corresponding relation in the inner
or unseen realms, producing compositions that are complete in form,
accurate in intellectual grasp and spiritually prophetic.

He fashioned his own wreath of immortelles,
With matchless skill.
Tones lent themselves with subtle eagerness
To do his will.
Repeat them as his genius did design,
His