"MacDowell Is Our Man"

THOMAS T. WATKINS

N THE evening of January 23, 1896, the Boston Sym¬
phony Orchestra, as part of its tenth season of New
York visits, presented in the Metropolitan Opera Flouse
a concert «hich was to have both immediate and future implica¬
tions for Columbia University. The program began with a per¬
formance of Tchaikowsky's Symphony No. 6, and closed with the
Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 by Franz Liszt. The remaining two
works on the program were by the thirty-five year old American
composer, Edward Alexander MacDowell. The first of these was
his Piano Concerto No. i, in which he performed the solo part,
and the other was his Second Suite for Orchestra, Op. .fS, sub¬
titled "Indian." This suite, dedicated "to the Boston Symphony
Orchestra and its conductor, Eiiiil Paur," was receiving its pre¬
miere performance from manuscript. As will be explained below,
the first draft of that manuscript has just been acquired for Special
Collections at Columbia through the generosity of the Mary Flag¬
ler Gary Charitable Trust.

AVth the possible exception of eight people in the auditorium,
the large audience and the composer-pianist himself were unaware
that this was something more than a regular concert. In one of the
boxes was a Columbia University group which had been appointed
by the Trustees to consider the type of music instruction that
would be compatible and feasible in a university, and which would
also nominate a candidate for the chair. As early as October 22,
1894, Frances Kn;ipp MacDowell, the composer's mother, had
written to her daughter-in-law in Boston telling her of her hopes
and plans to arrange something to enable her son to leave Boston
and return to New York, the city of his birth and still the location
of his parents' home. She further cautioned secrecy, since neither
her husband or Edward would have condoned her actions. One of