Classical Models.

Within the classical arena, the latter decades of the nineteenth century were a period during which there was little new in American music. The most respected American composers of the age—John Knowles Paine (1839-1906), Dudley Buck (1839-1909), Silas Gamaliel Pratt (1846-1916), Arthur W. Foote (1853-1937), Edward MacDowell (1860-1908), Horatio William Parker (1863-1919), and Mrs. H. H. A. Beach (1867-1944)—wrote wellreceived pieces that were derivative of European classical music, often from earlier periods. MacDowell's First Piano Sonata, known as the Tragica, typifies the genre: composed in 1891-1892, the Tragica was played frequently at concerts and parlor gatherings and inspired one leading critic to compare MacDowell to Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827). A century later MacDowell and his Tragica are all but forgotten by the music establishment. Yet even as MacDowell and his contemporaries busied themselves emulating European models, a...