As conveying an idea of MacDowell’s methods in the class-room I cannot do better than quote from a vivid account of him in this aspect written by one of his pupils, Miss J.S.  Watson: 

“A crowd of noisy, expectant students sat in the lecture room nervously eyeing the door and the clock by turns.  The final examination in course I of the Department of Music was in progress in the back room, the door of which opened at intervals as one pupil came out and another went in.  The examination was oral and private, and when the door closed behind me Professor MacDowell, who was standing at the open window, turned with a smile and motioned me toward a chair.  In a pedagogic sense it was not a regular examination.  There was something beautifully human in the way the professor turned the traditional stiff and starched catechism into a delightfully informal chat, in which the faburden, the Netherland School, early notation, the great clavichord players, suites and sonatas, formed the main topics.  The questions were put in such an easy, charming way that I forgot to be frightened; forgot everything but the man who walked rapidly about the room with his hands in his pockets and his head tipped slightly to one side; who talked animatedly and looked intently at the floor; but the explanations and suggestions were meant for me.  When I tripped upon the beginning of notation for instruments, he looked up quickly and said, ’Better look that up again; that’s important.’

“At the lectures Professor MacDowell’s aim had been to emphasise those things that had served to mark the bright spots in the growth and advancement of music as an intelligible language.  How well I recall my impression on the occasion of my first visit to the lectures, and afterwards!  There was no evidence of an aesthetic side to the equipment of the lecture room.  At the end it was vast and glaringly white, and except for an upright piano and a few chairs placed near the lecturer’s table the room was empty.  Ten or twelve undergraduates, youths of eighteen or twenty, and twenty or more special students and auditors, chiefly women, were gathered here.  The first lectures, treating of the archaic beginnings of music, might have easily fallen into a business-like recital of dates, but Professor MacDowell never sank into the passionless routine of lecture giving.  His were not the pedantic discourses students link most often to university chairs.  They were beautifully illuminating talks, delivered with so much freedom and such a rush of enthusiasm that one felt that the hour never held all that wanted to be said, and the abundant knowledge, in its longing to get out, kept spilling over into the to-morrows.

“His ideas were not tied up in a manuscript, nor doled out from notes.  They came untrammelled from a wonderfully versatile mind, and were illustrated with countless musical quotations and interlined with a wealth of literary and historical references.  There was no regular textbook; some students carried a Rockstro or a Hunt, but the majority depended upon the references made during the lectures.  These were numerous, and gave a broad view of this speculative period in musical history.