on#macdowell'sto#a#wild#rose” david#neumeyer the#

On MacDowell's "To a Wild Rose”

David NeumeyerThe University of Texas at Austin

21 March 2015

This &ile was originally part of a chapter in a book manuscript titled “Linear Analysis: Con-‐ventions and Contexts.” That project was abandoned in 2007 and its elements dispersed to two journal articles, a chapter in my monograph Meaning and Interpretation of Music in Cinema (Indiana University, 2015), and my Hearing Schubert blog. As the &irst paragraph makes plain enough, the chapter was about Schenkerian analysis as ideologically grounded interpretation, not “analysis” in the traditional descriptive sense.

Part 1: The wild rose

To close, let's return to the simplest of Schenker's urlinie classes, the line from ^3, and con-‐sider the particular way in which it conditions and channels – creates – interpretations of musical compositions, our subject this time being the well-‐known "To a Wild Rose," the &irst of Edward MacDowell's Woodland Sketches, Op. 51 (1896).

Since "To a Wild Rose" quickly became popular, it is perhaps not surprising that a story of its origins should eventually have surfaced, too:

Marian recalled how her husband would regularly write a few measures during breakfast – "like exercise" – before going off to the cabin. Normally, MacDowell dis-‐carded such fragments, and this particular morning he crumpled the paper and tossed it at the &ireplace. He happened to miss his target, however, and rather than summarily throwing it away, Marian later picked up the paper, uncrumpled it, and looked it over. She played it at the piano and decided to keep it. When Edward later returned from the cabin she showed it to him and said: "This is a charming little melody." Edward looked at it anew and agreed, "It is not bad – very simple. It makes me think of the wild roses near the cabin." MacDowell kept the music, and now he had a title. (Levy 152-‐3)

Levy's account is a close paraphrase of Marian MacDowell's story (MacDowell 1950, 10-‐11). She, however, cites the composer as saying "Log Cabin," not merely "cabin," and that calls into question the entire tale, because the Log Cabin (MacDowell's private workroom) was not built until 1898, two years after the Woodland Sketches were published, and was not ready for the composer's use till August of the following summer (Lowens 236). When

the MacDowells &irst moved to their newly purchased Petersborough property (an aban-‐doned eighteenth-‐century farm), Edward used an outbuilding converted to a music room. Only after this proved unsatisfactory was the Log Cabin built in the woods (235; Gilman 69). And, furthermore, since the Log Cabin was built on a west-‐facing hillside under tall trees, it is unlikely that roses would be growing in its immediate vicinity: northern roses will not bloom in shade – they will tolerate considerable shade during the rest of the year provided they have adequate exposure to sun during the long days of late spring and early summer.

In any case, if MacDowell was thinking of roses on their newly acquired property when he titled this composition, the list of possible species and varieties is quite small. Since the property included &ifteen acres of arable land (Gilman 52), it seems most likely that the roses were in hedge or fence rows or else on the forest verge next to the &ields. A few North American species were well-‐established and still common throughout the northeast at the time; these include R. virginiana, R. carolina, R. blanda, and R. nitida. Of these, the &irst two are very much the best candidates; R. blanda is at the far eastern edge of its range in New Hampshire (the center of its territory is Canada north and west of the Great Lakes), and R. nitida is an unusual rose – uniformly short stems with many short bristles and especially glossy foliage – and would only have been found on the property if there were patches of moist or even boggy peat. R. virginiana and R. carolina, on the other hand, may still be

On MacDowell’s “To a Wild Rose,” p. 2

found throughout the northeast today. They are quite closely related but distinct in plant (less so in &lower); their slightly larger &lowers have more rounded petals than the other species in my list, but in all four the bloom is a pale "wild-‐rose" pink with faint undertones of blue or lavender that become more pronounced as the bloom ages. R. virginiana has the most petal substance; R. blanda is the most delicate.

As I noted above, these three species can be found in open meadows, hedge and fence rows, and on forest verges; all spread both by seed and by colonizing through root suckers. My own experience in growing them and in observation is that R. virginiana, carolina, and blanda grow as loose shrubs, often forming thickets, and that plants of R. carolina will push higher than the others, often to 6 feet or more. Since the MacDowells purchased the prop-‐erty in May, and we know that Edward saw it himself, it is entirely likely that wild roses were among the &irst wild&lowers he noticed on hiking about the land in early summer. By most accounts, he was a serious gardener and plantsman, and it is highly unlikely that he would have failed to notice wild roses in bloom (MacDowell 1950, 24-‐25).

Only one other rose is at all a serious possibility: throughout the original thirteen colonies (excepting perhaps the southernmost), one ancient European hybrid is known to have naturalized. This was R. gallica of&icinalis, or the Apothecary Rose, that, as its name sug-‐gests, was widely grown as a medicinal plant, though its bloom size, rich color, multiple petals, profuse spring &lowering, and trouble-‐free plants made it a garden-‐worthy subject as well. Since the town of Peterborough was established in the late 1730s and incorporated in 1760, and the Hillcrest farmhouse was built in 1782 (Lowens 233fn9), well before the great nineteenth-‐century revolution in rose hybridization, it is entirely plausible that the Apothe-‐cary Rose may have been planted in the farm's "working" or kitchen gardens and over time established itself in a low, dense thicket. (This rose does not spread readily by seed and therefore would have been found close to the farm buildings.)

Perhaps then, composer and rose are mirrors of one another. Although the European rose (the Apothecary Rose) had naturalized, it is most likely, as I noted above, that MacDowell's rose was a truly native species – indeed, R. virginiana and R. carolina (with an allied spe-‐cies, R. californica) proved to be dif&icult to breed to European or Chinese roses (rose spe-‐cies, in general, interbreed fairly readily), which fact suggests that these American roses evolved in isolation and to some genetic distance from the world's three large species groups (Chinese, northern or "circumpolar," and European-‐mediterranean).

MacDowell, similarly, was an aesthetic product of Europe, like many American musicians in the latter part of the nineteenth century (Michael Broyles notes that &ive thousand Ameri-‐cans enrolled in German conservatories alone in the last two decades of the century (244).) It was only in the mid-‐1890s that MacDowell came to identify himself as an American com-‐poser, and even then his musical nationalism was complicated by European origins: his own fascination with Arthurian legend and the "Celtic"; his debt to Liszt, Wagner, and the Music of the Future; and an obvious debt to Grieg, not only as a model for negotiating the idea of a musical nationalism but concretely in compositional terms (the Lyric Pieces provided the template for MacDowell's own sets of character pieces, including the Woodland Sketches) (Broyles 244).


If Richard Crawford's assertion that "For all the years he spent in Europe, MacDowell was a born-‐and-‐bred American" is not entirely convincing, given the degree to which the com-‐poser willingly acclimatized himself to living in Germany in the 1880s, it is certainly true that "the New England countryside inspired the Woodland Sketches shortly after he told a colleague that he was 'working toward a music which should be American'" (2001, 381). That colleague was Hamlin Garland, with whom MacDowell corresponded beginning in early 1896 and whose writings struck a deep chord in MacDowell's mind at a critical mo-‐ment:

It is easy to see why Garland's artistic principles appealed to an Edward MacDowell in a nationalist frame of mind. Garland de&ined literary realism as "the truthful statement of an individual impression corrected by reference to fact." Following the example of impressionistic painters, he strove to register a "personal impression of a scene" rather than simply describing it. Seeking to fuse hard facts with strong feel-‐ings, Garland believed that an author should not merely "write of things as they are," but "of things as he sees them."

…. In fact, precisely because it was centered on personal impressions, an art of the commonplace and the "probable" could also tap an artist's full emotional range. (Crawford 2001, 378; emphasis in original)

Thus, we have two threads to explore, the "Americanist" and "tone-‐painting."


Part 2: Reading the piece

Here is the score.


According to Alan Levy, the composer took the fragment that Marian had rescued, and he "develop[ed] the melody into a full sketch" (153). If it is true that the &inal result evokes the "the evanescent delicacy of a wild rose through a profusion of short motives with sparingly placed dissonances" (Pesce), at the outset it could not have taken MacDowell long to realize that this "very simple" melody is not easy to harmonize with equally simple chordal move-‐ments. In fact, the most striking thing about harmony/tonality in "To a Wild Rose" is the


disparity between the uncomplicated tonal patterning of the whole and the bad voice-‐leading in the chordal foreground. The formal plan is AABA', all except B tonally closed (I-‐I) and ending with perfect authentic cadences in the home key (B moves to an expressive dominant ninth chord but never leaves the home key). Now consider the top system of Ex-‐ample 1.31, which shows the opening eight bars: it is as if MacDowell tried to replicate the larger-‐level simplicity by force. This is made all the more obvious by the version in the lower system, which is correct but militates rather too obviously against the "Celtic" sim-‐plicity of the melody's near-‐pentatonicism and repeated short gestures. (A complete form reduction of the piece in this vein is given at the end of this &ile.)

Example 1.31: (above) MacDowell’s version of mm. 1-8; (below) a more “correct” version

In Example 1.32, &ind an attempted voice-‐leading reduction of MacDowell's original.


Bar 1 signals either four or &ive part writing, depending on whether or not you include both C# and E of the melody, but bar 2 splits the left hand's E4 into two voices, D4 and E4, which means that the model was actually six part writing (since now it is clear that we need both melody notes from the right hand, as they represent continuing voices). The sound and dis-‐position of voices in bar 2 clearly signals a pastoral pedal-‐point construction, so that by this time all the topics we need for a piece suggested by the title are in play: simply voiced ma-‐jor triad in bar 1, a simple repeated rhythmic &igure in the melody, pedal-‐point "pastoral" bass and &ifth (A3-‐E4). But all this comes unglued in bar 3, when the expected return to the triad of bar 1 does not materialize: we do get a diatonic functional substitute (f# as vi) but in parallel &ifths with the preceding (which might be relegated, weakly, to the pastoral to-‐pos) and with a seventh plainly sounded in the melody (though off the beat): see the results in the partial system below the reduction. The seventh is neither picked up by another voice nor resolved – indeed it is ignored and the F#5 remains prominent into the following bar. The only way to &ix the problem is to imply the seventh in the left hand and move the soprano to F#5 to avoid doubling the seventh – that is the version shown in the reduction. By the second half of m. 4, a dominant ninth type sounds but in an uncommon inversion (all inversions of the dominant ninth are uncommon); the voice-‐leading from this B9 chord to the subsequent E9 is rough at best; both 7 and 9 in this E9 are pushed upward rather than (properly) down to resolutions as c# substitutes for the tonic in m. 6 – these do resolve cor-‐rectly (though we have to assume an E4) in m. 8, where the tonic triad reappears.

As we look to explanations for this odd part-‐writing, we can immediately rule out a lack of skill – MacDowell had a thorough European training and many successful compositions be-‐hind him; he was at the height of his career by the time he wrote Op. 51 (he was in fact ap-‐pointed as the &irst Professor of Music in Columbia University the year that the Woodland Sketches were published). Several other pieces in the Woodland Sketches, and a later com-‐panion set, New England Idyls, Op. 62 (1902), use the same device of melody with a simple, slowly changing chordal accompaniment: none shows the voice-‐leading peculiarities of "To a Wild Rose."

Thus, we have to assume those aberrations were deliberate. Crawford says that the "har-‐monic dissonances bring to MacDowell's sound image of a woodland &lower just enough tonal confusion to cast an aura of mystery around it" (1996, 546), and he explains the dis-‐parity between melody and harmony as the contrast of "&lashes of dissonance and har-‐monic ambiguity [that] undercut the atmosphere of serene loveliness," and he interprets this in terms of a life-‐death opposition: "beauty (the tuneful surface) and truth (the disso-‐nant undercurrent) [are fused] in a musical image that celebrates the life and mourns the impending decay of a woodland &lower" (2001, 381). (It is worth noting here that, unlike &lorists' roses, blooms of the four species named above are surprisingly short-‐lived, as are those of most wild roses – the blooms already show signs of passing by their second day, especially in warm weather, and very few last beyond three.) Crawford also invokes the tra-‐ditional rose/thorn binary, but at the same time he draws parallels between the symme-‐tries of the rose bloom and the simple perfection of the musical composition's design (elsewhere [1996, 546] he says, following comments by MacDowell himself, that "the sound image does not represent the &lower itself").


Although our brief look at the opening of "To a Wild Rose" has already con&irmed the oppo-‐sitions, I would read the physical comparisons in a somewhat different way. Rather than imagining picking the &lower, as Crawford does, it makes more sense to me to think of the bloom on a plant in the overgrown meadow or hedgerow setting where MacDowell proba-‐bly encountered it: in such a setting, the unexpected combination of simplicity and under-‐stated elegance in the bloom with the thicket-‐forming habits of the plant and the natural jumble of briers, grasses, annual and perennial wild&lowers, and shrubs and small trees, would give rise to a sensation of "jewel in the rough." It is that impression I suspect Mac-‐Dowell is conveying through the opposed qualities of harmony and melody in the opening of "To a Wild Rose."

A Schenkerian reading from ^3 seems tailor-‐made to convey this sense of "jewel in the rough." The disparities of harmony and melody in the opening measures, and the disparity between the parade of unexpected chordal &igures (as well as the surprising dissonances in section B) and the remarkable simplicity of the formal and tonal design, are easily mirrored in the opposition of a chaotic foreground and serenely ordered background, in a manner very close to Schachter's thematically-‐driven analyses discussed above: see Ex. 1.33, which shows background and &irst middleground levels.

Example 1.33: Background and &irst middleground reading, from ^3.

Foreground graph:


This reading conforms well to formal design because of the closed tonal endings in A, mo-‐tion toward the dominant in B (to an interruption), and simple return to ^3 over I in the re-‐prise. The &inal ^2 has to be implied, but that tone is easily placed and its implication is convincing due to the large registral shifts in both hands in the relevant bars. Multi-‐level recurrences of third-‐lines and neighbor notes (especially E-‐F#) add to a sense of melodic unity and clarity. Syntactical simplicity in the background is combined with oppositions that can be represented through the structural levels (order:chaos, background: fore-‐ground).

The problem is that these oppositions are now completely under control: readings from ^3 in general are fantasies of a perfect musical-‐syntactical-‐expressive world. Because of the problems in the foreground, we readily understand the piece as paradoxical (appropriate since at its deepest level the life-‐death pair is not so much an opposition as an expression of the most fundamental existential paradox): the piece is about the distance between the background and foreground, about their irreconcilable difference. That property is perhaps most noticeable in the cadence to the theme period – the dominant is &irst diverted in an odd direction (iii, not vi) then bears its ninth directly into the &inal tonic. That ninth espe-‐cially brings the piece in proximity to the sentimental salon piece or song (still a consider-‐able distance from popular dance or the music hall). As Broyles puts it, in speaking of the art music/popular music dichotomy of the later nineteenth century:


…some music blurred into a vaguely de&ined middleground, a type of music that emulated art music in some ways but in others assumed a more popular or commer-‐cial character. Much piano music of the late nineteenth century, for instance, fell into that category. Everyone played MacDowell's short piano pieces, but MacDowell was the most respected composer of the day, an artist par excellence. (215)

Because of the power of the Schenkerian graph's hierarchies (most readily evident in read-‐ings from ^3), it is not easy to imagine how one might rethink them in a way that will pre-‐serve a sense of opposition, of con&lict. Crawford speaks to what he calls the "conundrums" MacDowell (and other would-‐be Americanists) faced: "From one perspective, MacDowell's career and music show America's dependence on Europe; from another, the American iden-‐tity of a piece like 'To a Wild Rose' seems indisputable; and from still another, both Mac-‐Dowell and this small piano piece re&lect an interweaving of European and American traits that contradicts either label" (2001, 381). The problem is that "[w]hile none of these views is wrong, neither does any of them tell the whole story." So also with the elegant graph from ^3, which, despite itself (or rather, exactly in accordance with the capacities and biases Schenkerian built into it), suppresses differences in the service of synthesis: differences are "delays" on the urlinie's path through tonal space – they are not conundrums. If we cannot always point directly to oppositions such as Europe/America, high art/low art, nature/culture, rural/urban, we can, as Crawford does, point to simplicity/complexity or clarity/ambiguity. The two simplest ways to do that are (1) to introduce elements of other (con-‐&licting) readings into the display of structural levels; and (2) to annotate the graphs, as we did with the Stradella aria above, though now to a different purpose: in order to resist the submersion of events into a smooth &low of voice-‐leading and harmonic progression.

The point is not merely to allow contradictory readings to co-‐exist: it is to dramatize the contradictions that lie, not so much under the surface as in the surface of "To a Wild Rose," the apparent simplicity that, just as obviously, is not so simple (we already know this by bar 3), the unresolved tension between a folk-‐like simplicity, traditional patterns, and the aes-‐thetic of the Music of the Future – the tension inherent in MacDowell's impossible notion of pulling Wagner into the sphere of the miniature: "His music-‐dramas, shorn of the fetters of the actual spoken word, emancipated from the materialism of acting, painting, and furni-‐ture, must be considered the greatest achievement in our art" (cited in Gilman 79). The sheer absurdity of this sentiment makes one sympathetic enough to wish that MacDowell might succeed in the perfect background with a line from ^3.

The realities of the piece, however, are different. The end result of "muddying" the levels with additional content is shown in Example 1.34, whose annotations and additional "lev-‐els" both con&irm and undermine the original reading from ^3.


Example 1.34:

Between the background and a detailed, traditional foreground lie two fragments whose exact level-‐status is not speci&ied. The &irst—the second system in Ex. 1.34—insists on the dif&iculties in voice-‐leading in the opening period by representing them in strict counter-‐point (even offering an alternative [see Example 1.35]);


Example 1.35:

The—second—shown below (Example 1.36) reveals the "inevitability" of the dominant ninth in the middleground voice-‐leading of that period. The alternative (equally plausible) reading of section B reminds one that the discovery of technical devices does not necessar-‐ily lead to single solutions in the foreground. By disrupting the space between the back-‐ground and foreground levels, we can isolate the background, emphasize its exaggerated simplicity, hint, even, at an association between Macdowell's late nineteenth-‐century Celtic nostalgia and Schenker's attempt to preserve or revive a disappearing aesthetic culture. Be-‐low the foreground level is an annotated account of the dizzying series of stylistic cues in the harmonies of the main theme period. These are in direct contrast to the smooth &low of voices and harmonies in the foreground graph.

Example 1.36:


References

Brown, Abbie Farwell. The Boyhood of Edward MacDowell. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1927.

Broyles, Michael. "Art Music from 1860 to 1920." In David Nicholls, ed. The Cambridge His-tory of American Music, pp. 214-‐54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Crawford, Richard. "Edward MacDowell: Musical Nationalism and an American Tone Poet." Journal of the American Musicological Society 49/3 (1996): 528-‐60.

Crawford, Richard. America's Musical Life. New York: Norton, 2001.Gilman, Lawrence. Edward MacDowell: A Study. London/ New York: J. Lane, 1909.Levy, Alan H. Edward MacDowell: An American Master. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998.Lowens, Margery Morgan. "The New York Years of Edward MacDowell." Ph.D. dissertation,

University of Michigan, 1971.MacDowell, Marian. Random Notes on Edward MacDowell and his Music. Boston: A.P.

Schmidt, 1950.

Postscript: a version of “To a Wild Rose” as a three-‐part song form, with the “correct” har-‐monies from Example 1.31.


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