The death of MacDowell completed the blow which his failing brain-power had dealt to American music and his many sympathisers, between two and three years before. His spirit lives, however, in his music and in the wonderful MacDowell Colony at Peterboro, New Hampshire. The latter is an amazing realisation of the composer's dream of an ideal environment for creative work in Music, Art and Literature. A chapter describing the Colony will be found further on in this book. In addition to the central organisation, now known as _The Edward MacDowell Association, Incorporated_, there are springing up in many American cities offshoots known as MacDowell Clubs, which contribute towards the expenses of the Colony.
Macdowell's position to-day in creative musical art remains the same as it was twenty years ago--one of unassailable independence and individualism. Although these two factors, whether assailable or not, must be a feature of any composer who lays claim to greatness, in MacDowell's case they are so marked as to form the strongest bulwark of his natural position among great music makers. His tone poetry is of a quality and power that is not quite like that of any other composer, and in the portraying, or suggesting, as he preferred to call it, of Natural, Historical and Legendary subjects he stands alone. Superbly gifted as a lyrical poet both in the literary and the musical sense, and with a most refined and keen feeling for the dramatic, he spoke with a voice of singular eloquence and power. Probably his greatest achievement was his remarkable, unerring ability to create atmospheres of widely varied kinds in his music, and in this respect there is no composer quite his equal. The soft beauty, grandeur, vastness and might of Nature; the joys and sorrows of Humanity; the romance of History and imaginative Legend; the buoyancy of sunshine and wind; the mysteriousness of enchanted woods; all these he translated with inimitable vividness into music. He could suggest with as definite and unmistakable a musical atmosphere, the simple beauty of a little wild flower, as the might of the sea; as well the fanciful and imaginative scenes of fairy tale as the wild and lonely vastness of the great American prairies; as well the joviality and humour of his countrymen as the elemental strength, and rude, stern manliness of the North American Indian, and the heroic, stirring atmosphere of the ancient bards.