The Other Sea in MacDowell's Sea Pieces

Abstract

In 1898, Edward MacDowell published his Sea Pieces, op. 55, a cycle of eight works for piano, each with title and epigraph (fig. 1). In describing them ten years later, Lawrence Gilman stated: This music is full of glamour, awe, mystery, of sea; of its sinister and terrible beauty, but also of its tonic charm, its secret allurement.' Such a positive musical depiction of sea had not been typical of earlier generations of composers, who had most often seen sea as a dangerous, threatening force or as symbolic of human separation and longing: as late as act 3 of Tristan it is COd und Leer, a waste of waters. As its point of departure, this study suggests that three pieces of cycle that focus most directly on sea (fig. 1, nos. 1, 6, and 8) transcend their familiar accompanying poetic message about powerful and mysterious sea. MacDowell brings his listeners to an awareness of sea as more than a physical presence, as something that can evoke a higher consciousness of infinite and eternal. Thus, MacDowell's Sea Pieces partake to some degree of what eighteenthand nineteenth-century writers called the sublime experience. Letters to MacDowell's close friend George Templeton Strong, usually an important source for composer's thoughts on various pieces, are lacking for 1898, since Strong was living nearby.2 Of numerous isolated manuscript fragments that survive (see Appendix), many preserve final or near-final versions whose variants do not significantly affect our view of piece. There are several instances, however, where earlier versions reveal MacDowell's changing approach to