Analysis And Study On Edward Mcdowell’s Piano Pieces In His Later Period

Edward MacDowell, as a native American composer, was the first person who has won international reputation. His musical works in the later period were the most mature reflection on his personal music style. He was one of the earliest American composers who integrated the Indian musical elements into professional musical creation, which contributed to promoting the creation of native American music. Edward MacDowell loved his own country, deeply believing that music was the soul of language which could not be expressed by words in the depth of human’s heart. He was fond of making use of scenery and incidents in the daily life as the source of inspiration for musical creation and using music to build a lyrical effect on expressing his emotion through natural scenery. He emphasized on the delivery between music and the spirit. A detailed analysis become one of the most effective ways to help us understand the early American professional musical creation.The paper is divided into four chapters to analyze and research MacDowell’s piano pieces in his later period. The first chapter mainly introduces MacDowell’s life and conception of his musical creation, then roughly classifies his late piano pieces contents. The second chapter statistics musical form structure types of MacDowell’s later period piano pieces, analyzing and concluding the characters of the structure types by the combination principle of this type. In the third chapter, we conclude his melody characteristics and folk music elements based on analyzing his melody change, beat, strength of rhythm and emotion of his piano pieces. The last chapter aims at analyzing and researching the harmony and tonal type of MacDowell’s later period piano pieces. Through analysis and study of these four chapters, we will find that there are German’s rigorousness, French’s romance, impressionistic haziness and Indian tones in MacDowell’s piano works, which melt together, and become his unique American piano music style.