ndy, Debussy, and Strauss. It is in the novel disposition of
familiar material--in what Mr. Apthorp has happily called his "free,
instinctive application of the old in a new way"--that MacDowell's
emphatic individuality consists. Whether it is a more signal
achievement to create a new speech through the readjustment of
established locutions than to evolve it from fresh and unworked
elements, is open to debate. Be that as it may, however, MacDowell's
achievement is of the former order.

His harmonic method is ingenious and pliable. An over-insistence upon
certain formulas--eloquent enough in themselves--has been charged
against it, and the accusation is not without foundation. MacDowell is
exceedingly fond, for instance, of suspensions in the chord of the
diminished seventh. There is scarcely a page throughout his later work
in which one does not encounter this effect in but slightly varied
form. Yet there is a continual richness in his harmonic texture. I can
think of no other composer, save Wagner, whose chord-progressions are
so full and opulent in colour. His tonal web is always densely
woven--he avoids "thinness" as he avoids the banal phrase and the
futile decoration. In addition to the plangency of his chord
combinations, as such, his polyphonic skill is responsible for much of
the solidity of his fabric. His pages, particularly in the more recent
works, are studded with examples of felicitous and dexterous
counterpoint--poetically significant, and of the most elastic and
untrammelled contrivance. Even in passages of a merely episodic
character, one is struck with the vitality and importance of his inner
voices. Dissonance--in the sense in which we understand dissonance
to-day--plays a comparatively unimportant part in his technical
method. The climax of the second of the "Sea Pieces"--"From a
Wandering Iceberg"--marks about as extreme a point of harmonic
conflict as he ever touches. Nor has he been profoundly affected by
the passion for unbridled chromaticism engendered in modern music by
the procedures of Chopin, Liszt, and Wagner. Even in the earlier of
the orchestral works, "Hamlet and Ophelia" and "Lancelot and
Elaine"--both written in Germany in the days when the genius of Wagner
was an ambient and inescapable flame--the writing is comparatively
free from chromatic effects. On the other hand, he is far less
audaciously diatonic than Richard Strauss. His style is, in fact, a
subtle blend of opposing tendenci