OTTSCHALK AND MASON

CHAPTER VII.

E. A. MACDOWELL

CHAPTER VIII.

ARTHUR FOOTE AND MRS. H. H. A. BEACH

CHAPTER IX.

MISCELLANEOUS PROGRAM BY AMERICAN COMPOSERS

ILLUSTRATIONS

W. S. G. Mathews . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_

Joh. Sebastian Bach, Geo. Fred. Handel

Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang A. Mozart

Ludwig van Beethoven

Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn

Robert Schumann

Frederic Francois Chopin

Franz Liszt

PART I.

THE MASTERS AND THEIR MUSIC.

CHAPTER I.

MOVING FORCES IN MUSIC

The art of music shows the operation of several moving forces, or
motives, which have presented themselves to the composer with
sufficient force to inspire the creation of the works we have. The
most important of these motives is the Musical Sense itself, since it
is to this we owe the creation of the folk-song, with its pleasing
symmetries, and the greater part of the vast literature of instrumental
music.

Aside from the expression of the musical consciousness as such, the
composer has been moved at times by the motive of Dramatic Expression.
In opera, for example, a great deal of the music has for its object to
intensify the feeling of the scene. Accordingly, the composer
carefully selects those combinations and sequences of tones which in
his opinion best correspond with the dramatic moment they are intended
to accompany. And since many of these moments are of extreme
intensity, even tragic in character, very strong and intense
combinations of tones are sometimes employed, such as could not be
justified in an instrumental composition to be played independently of
any illustrative scenery or story.

There is a third motive of composition which also has had a large place
in the development of instrumental music--viz., the Expression of the
Individual Mood of the Composer; and the further we come down in the
history of music, the more unrestricted we find the operation of this
motive.

In the order of development, the purely musical is entitled to the
first place; and it has also been the principal moving cause in the
development of the art of music, from its universality--its power to
act upon all grades of musical consciousness according to the ability
of the individual musician. For example, the desire to realize in
tones agreeable symmetries of rhythm and strong antitheses of melodic
sequence has given rise to the folk songs, all of which operate upon
what are now very ele