Welcome to my website! For a long time, I have been contemplating making my own site to host my eclectic interests and ideas. I finally decided to sit down and start working on it this September.
The Edward MacDowell Project
Background
One of the motivations for creating this website is to host The Edward MacDowell Project. Edward MacDowell (1860–1908) was one of the first internationally recognized American composers. As a long-time New Hampshire resident, I was drawn to MacDowell’s ties to the area. The MacDowell Colony (now referred to simple as “MacDowell”) is an artists’ residency and workshop founded by MacDowell and his spouse Marian in Peterborough, New Hampshire, at the location where Edward spent the last years of his life.
As I grew interested in MacDowell as an American historical figure, I became fond of his compositions and musical style. My honors thesis at the University of Connecticut, “The Influence of Programmatic and Exotic Elements on Musical Structure in Edward MacDowell’s Piano Sonata #2, Op. 50 “Eroica,” analyzed MacDowell’s use of recurring themes and other musical elements in his second piano sonata.
[I want to note that a few years after writing this thesis, I became aware of a wonderful article by Dolores Pesce entitled “MacDowell’s Eroica Sonata and its Lisztian Legacy” in Music Review 49/3 (1988) which discusses many of the same programmatic elements I discussed in my thesis. Unfortunately, this hadn’t surfaced in my research for this project. Admittedly, I was still new to searching online research databases for journal articles in 2009–10 and thus, this article hadn’t surfaced in my research. At the same time, this honors thesis for my BM in Music Theory was primarily to demonstrate my own critical thinking and music analysis skills—and thus, I am proud that little undergraduate me had come to similar observations and conclusions made by Pesce in her article. Given the similarities, I opted not to publish my thesis on the UConn Digital Commons when it became available.]
The Project
There are several goals for this project, of various difficulty and length.
Create a database of Edward MacDowell compositions
It has never been easier to create interactive websites and databases. While many composer pages on IMSLP have detailed databases, the Edward MacDowell page (and the list of compositions) is woefully inadequate. I intend to update the list of compositions on IMSLP, but as I work through the project, I am constructing a database in Notion. This will contain information about the compositions, its instrumentation, and the progress of the compositions that make up this project.
Typeset and engrave new modern editions of all of Edward MacDowell’s compositions
Before Makemusic made the decision to sunset Finale, I had already started shifting towards using Dorico as my primary notation software program. I was drawn to the quality of engraving of Dorico projects and relished at the idea of creating modern editions of MacDowell’s oeuvre. Almost every piece is available on IMSLP today, but the majority of the editions available are poor quality and/or editorially inconsistent.
License editions through Creative Commons
My goal is to provide beautiful editions that can be used for performance or score study, available for free using Creative Commons licensing. Currently, I have settled on licensing my editions under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license to prevent someone or some publisher from trying to monetize my editions, while allowing for use of these scores for academic publishing and performances. (Note: commercial recordings made from performances of these editions would still be acceptable. I aim only to prevent others from selling my editions.)
Stretch Goal: Establish The Edward MacDowell Project on the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI)
The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is a “community-driven, open-source effort to define a system for encoding musical documents in a machine-readable structure.” This community has formalized best practices for encoding musical documents via XML 5.0. Given the recent shutdown of Finale, I cannot assume that Dorico will remain a usable notation software for decades and decades to come. My hope is to convert my new editions into XML and edit the files to meet MEI standards, so people can enjoy Edward MacDowell’s music for centuries to come!
Stretch Goal: Publish facsimiles of MacDowell manuscripts
Most of Edward MacDowell’s musical manuscripts currently are housed at the Library of Congress in the Edward and Marian MacDowell Collection. I am still trying to locate what happened with the Margery Morgan Lowens collection on Edward MacDowell at the University of Maryland, which was the other major collection. Records for this collection have been removed from the UMD Library website.
My goal would be to photograph and publish these facsimiles of any manuscripts of the scores, since all of these manuscripts are in the public domain. Since the Library of Congress’s collection is stored offsite, there is limited access to this wonderful trove of materials. In a perusal of some of these documents, I have even found an unpublished score from MacDowell’s early years that I hope to publish with this project. But, the hope is to provide the public with easier access for these materials.
This is a stretch goal that will take a lot of time to deliver on, if I ever get to it. But my hope is that eventually one day I can embark on this project.
Let me get to work
I have a lot of work to do on this project. And I’m fairly busy with life at the moment. But I’ve made this a personal research project that I plan to work on in the coming months and years as a way to stay engaged with the music community. As scores become available, I will make a blog post announcing their availability! Now…it’s time for me to get back to work. 😁