Woodland Sketches #1: A Song History
The piece listed here as "Woodland Sketches #1" is "To a Wild Rose," the opening number in Edward MacDowell's Woodland Sketches, Op. 51, a set of ten short piano pieces.[1] The Morgan Library catalogs the first regular edition as published in New York by P. L. Jung, copyright 1896.[2] Arthur P. Schmidt of Boston later reissued the set from Jung's plates.[1][3] In 1896 MacDowell and his wife, Marian, acquired farm property outside Peterborough, New Hampshire, where they spent their summers, and his early biographer Lawrence Gilman believed that the countryside around Peterborough left its mark on the Woodland Sketches.[4][5] The woodland log cabin there, started by Marian as a surprise workplace for him and finished under his supervision, dates from 1899, a few years after the set was published.[6][2] The farm later became the site of the MacDowell Colony for artists, which officially began in 1907 and which Marian saw through to reality after her husband died in 1908.[4]
Antoine Berjon, Yellow Daisies and Pink Wild Rose, green, yellow, black, brown, pink, and white chalk. Shown for its wild rose; it has no connection to the piece.
A Native American source for the melody has been claimed at least since John F. Porte's 1922 biography, which says the piece is founded on a melody of the Brotherton Indians.[7] According to a summary of Francis Brancaleone's 1989 study, MacDowell drew his American Indian motives mainly from Theodore Baker's German dissertation on the music of North American Indians, and Woodland Sketches is among the works that study examines.[8] Baker's dissertation, printed in Leipzig in 1882, does include a song credited to the Brotherton Indians.[9] None of the sources consulted here, however, compares that song with "To a Wild Rose," and the summary of Brancaleone's study does not single out this piece, so the Brotherton attribution is best treated as Porte's claim rather than an established fact.[7][8][9]
The piece travelled well beyond the concert hall in MacDowell's lifetime: Gilman recalls telling him he had first heard it played at a high-school graduation, to which the composer answered, "I suppose she pulled it up by the roots!"[5] Schmidt published Arthur Hartmann's transcription for violin and piano in 1907, and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra under Henry Hadley recorded it on an undated 78 rpm disc issued on the Music Appreciation label.[10][11] Shelley Stevens includes it, under the title "Woodland Sketches #1," in Classical Music For Mountain Dulcimer, a book of twenty-six intermediate classical arrangements for solo dulcimer in DAD tuning, with both tablature and standard notation, published by Fingers Of Steel.[12]
Sources
- IMSLP: "10 Woodland Sketches, Op.51 (MacDowell, Edward)".
- The Morgan Library & Museum: "Woodland sketches / by Edward MacDowell" (New York: P.L. Jung, c1896).
- Internet Archive (Wellesley College Library): "Woodland sketches" (Boston: Arthur P. Schmidt, reprinted from P.L. Jung plates).
- Library of Congress: "A Century of Creativity: The MacDowell Colony 1907–2007 – History".
- Internet Archive: Lawrence Gilman, "Edward MacDowell: A Study" (1908).
- MacDowell: "Edward MacDowell's Log Cabin".
- Internet Archive: John F. Porte, "Edward MacDowell: A Great American Tone Poet, His Life and Music" (1922).
- Indiana University, Musical Borrowing: Brancaleone, "Edward MacDowell and Indian Motives" (1989).
- Internet Archive: Theodore Baker, "Über die Musik der nordamerikanischen Wilden" (1882).
- Internet Archive (Gaylord Music Library, Washington University): "To a wild rose ... transcription for violin and pianoforte by Arthur Hartmann" (1907).
- Internet Archive (Great 78 Project): "To a Wild Rose," New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Henry Hadley.
- Fingers Of Steel: "Shelley Stevens, Classical Music For Mountain Dulcimer".
- Image: Antoine Berjon, Yellow Daisies and Pink Wild Rose, green, yellow, black, brown, pink, and white chalk. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.