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.
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