1st Edition
Edward MacDowell’s European Piano Music The Forging of an American Composer
Edward MacDowell’s European Piano Music is a critical study of the piano music that MacDowell composed during his European sojourn (1876-1888), steeped in reception history and with a special emphasis of programmaticism.
The book expands current knowledge of MacDowell’s childhood in four chapters based on his previously uninvestigated sheet music collection, thereby achieving a better balance among the stages of MacDowell’s life than is evident in most books of the life-and-works variety. Prolific contemporaneous music criticism, meticulously preserved in MacDowell’s scrapbooks, is likewise undervalued in the MacDowell literature, but it furnishes penetrating observations about the expressive and programmatic content of numerous compositions, especially as it was revealed to critics when MacDowell performed his own works. Lastly, the book offers explanations for why MacDowell immersed himself in European culture for decades and then, at a crucial juncture in his career, embraced diverse American heritages and worked toward a conception of a pluralistic music that was American “in a creative sense.”
The book’s content and methodology would appeal most directly to specialists within the broad fields of musicology and music theory, particularly within American art music and its composers; nineteenth century music; program music; reception history; and piano literature.
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
List of Examples
List of Tables
List of Abbreviations
Prologue
Chapter One The Sheet Music Collection of Walter and Eddie McDowell: Provenance, Contents, Cosmopolitanism
Chapter Two The Collection and Eddie’s Teachers: Buitrago, Desvernine, Carreño
Chapter Three The Sheet Music Collection’s Compositional Impact
Chapter Four “Untold Gold”: Taking the Juvenilia Seriously
Chapter Five Leaving Paris, Finding a Vocation in Germany
Chapter Six “Modernity” in MacDowell’s First Three Published Piano Works
Chapter Seven The Transatlantic First Piano Concerto
Chapter Eight Frankfurt Character Pieces: Forgotten Narratives
Chapter Nine Wiesbaden Character Pieces: Literary and Theatrical Embodiments
Chapter Ten The Shakespearean Second Piano Concerto
Epilogue
Appendix 1: The Sheet Music Collection’s Contents Organized by Media and Genres
Bibliography
Index
Biography
Paul Bertagnolli, Professor of Music at the University of Houston's Moores School of Music
