Edward MacDowell’s European Piano Music: The Forging of an American Composer (Routledge Research in Music)

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 of the 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 d