Optional Titles to Movements, Furnished by the Composer.

  1. Legend.

  2. Love-Song.

  3. In War Time.

  4. Dirge.

  5. Village Festival.

In the Indian Suite we have one of the most graphic examples of MacDowell’s power of creating atmospheres and impressions of big subjects.  It is the finest and most mature of his orchestral works, thoroughly individual and without a trace of the nineteenth century German romanticism that is found in his earlier productions.  Its musical declamation is commanding and infinitely noble.  The atmosphere of the great rolling plains, mighty forests, and vast and lonely retreats is unerringly created.  The notes of wildness and an indescribably touching spirit of far away romance are sounded, telling of a forgotten and dying elemental race.  In the Suite the lodges of the Red men rise again before our eyes; their old legends, savage war dances, love romances, their sorrows, joys and festivities live once more.  MacDowell has caught the spirit of the days when the rude, but curiously interesting aborigines of America lived; of days that are now but treasured legends that still stir the hearts of the young in many lands.  He conveyed a feeling of this atmosphere in his music with an unerring touch, the effect of which is heightened by the use of material derived from the native tunes of the North American Indians.  The Indian Suite is undoubtedly one of the most noble and impressive works that MacDowell ever composed, containing in the Dirge movement one of his most striking utterances.  In his last days he expressed a preference for this above anything else he had composed.  The Suite is full of stirring strength, vast tonalities, depth of feeling and elemental greatness, and is scored with a mastery of orchestral tone colour used solely and unerringly to enhance the poetic suggestiveness of the whole.  It was fully sketched between three and four years before its first appearance, as the composer spent much time in becoming more closely acquainted with Red Indian tunes.

1. Legend (Not fast.  With much dignity and character).  This opens with a romantic horn-call of the plains that is significant of the whole Suite:—­

[Music.]

It is heard again at the end of the last movement.  Indescribable is the effect of the paused note, the silence, and then the far away answer.  The call is elaborated with rich effect, but the atmosphere of vastness and loneliness is preserved.  The suggestiveness of this introduction is wonderfully vivid, for in a moment we are transported from the civilisation of to-day to the wildness and romance of the old days on the plains of the great West.  The introduction finished, the movement proper begins (Twice as fast.  With decision.) with a long tremolo on the note B. At the fifth bar a harvest song of the Iroquois Indians appears:—­