Edward Macdowell An American Master

Edward MacDowell was one of the finest composers of nineteenth-century America. In his lifetime, MacDowell's fame was widespread throughout Europe and the United States; his music was praised by none other than Franz Liszt, Jules Massenet, and Edvard Grieg. While his fame was extensive, MacDowell's place in music began to fade after his untimely and tragic death in 1908, and his music and reputation has since suffered a certain neglect. Alan Levy's biography is the first full-length work on MacDowell and draws extensively on personal papers and letters, largely closed from public access until recently. Levy challenges the omission of MacDowell from most musical histories and returns the spotlight to this long-overlooked composer. Levy covers MacDowell's early life and schooling in New York, his musical studies in France and Germany, and his emergence as a keyboard artist and composer. From there, the biography moves on to MacDowell's successful career in Boston and in Peterboro, New Hampshire. Levy concludes with MacDowell's tenure as the first Professor of Music at Columbia University and his untimely decline and death. There is also discussion of Marian MacDowell's successful establishment of the MacDowell Colony for Artists, which continues to the present day. Alan Levy elegantly captures the story of this composer who enjoyed musical talent and relative popular success during his lifetime. He brings together a great deal of otherwise inaccessible information and material on a somewhat muted voice in American Music History.

A timeless tale of human strength and weakness set in one of the most vibrant periods of American musical history, MacDowell traces the composer's rise from humble beginnings in lower Manhattan to the pinnacle of musical fame, and the precipitous fall from grace that followed.

The Dictionary of American Classical Composers covers over 650 composers active from the 18th century to today. Covering all classical styles, it offers the most comprehensive overview of key composers in the United States available. Entries include basic biographical information and critical analysis of each composer's key works and ideas. Entries also include worklists and bibliographic information. Whenever possible, the entries will have been checked by the composers themselves to assure greatest possible accuracy. This new edition, completely updated and expanded from the 1984 edition, also includes over 200 historic photographs.

Combining cultural analysis with historical and personal accounts of a century of musical life at the American Academy in Rome, this volume provides a history of the AAR's Rome Prize in Composition.

In July of 1884, pianist Calixa Lavallée performed a recital of works by American composers that began a highly influential series of such concerts. Over the course of the next decade, hundreds of all-American concerts were performed in the United States and Europe, a movement that fostered both the development and the perception of American music as a unique art form. A Tidal Wave of Encouragement-the title of which is derived from one observer's description of the movement-is the first in-depth study of this significant period in American music. Providing a comprehensive history of the Concerts as well as detailed accounts of the intense critical debate surrounding them, author E. Douglas Bomberger reveals how one decade shaped the future of American classical music and very much impacted the way we hear it today. The movement, crucial in focusing discussion on American music and providing performance opportunities for composers and musicians for whom no such opportunities had before existed, was far more extensive and widespread than most scholarship had credited it. This oversight is due in large part to the dearth of objective studies of the Concerts; previous considerations have tended either toward the merely nostalgic or toward the unnecessarily disparaging. Bomberger's work is a corrective to this, as well as much-needed historical and critical account of a project whose influence had yet to be fully acknowledged.

Choral music represented an important part of American cultural life during the nineteenth century, whether integral to worship or merely for entertainment. Despite this history, choral music remains one of the more neglected studies in the scholarly community. In an effort to fill this gap, N. Lee Orr and W. Dan Hardin offer a new approach to the study of choral music by mapping out and bringing bibliographical control to this expansive and challenging field of study. Their unique guide focuses on literature related to choral music in the United States from the end of the second decade of the nineteenth century through the earlier part of the twentieth century. Choral Music in Nineteenth-Century America explores the entire range of choral music conceived, written, published, rehearsed, and performed by an ensemble of singers gathered specifically to present the music before an audience or congregation. The guide expertly sifts through the extensive literature to cite the most notable sources for study and provides individual chapters on the leading nineteenth-century composers who were instrumental in the development of choral music.