MACDOWELL BY SMOULDERING EMBERS OP 61 NO 6
Key D flat major Tempo Musingly Style Romantic Will improve your ✓Pedalling ✓Chord voicing ✓Balance between hands
The majority of MacDowell’s published works span a period of just under 20 years. During this time, he went from being a relatively unknown American pianist-composer trying to establish himself in Germany, to Columbia University’s first Professor of Music.
By Smouldering Embers was written around 1901. Op 61. In 1908, the composer’s first biographer, Lawrence Gilman, referred to the as ‘pianistic nature studies’. He suggested that they showed ‘…unfamiliar timbre. There is a turn of phrase, a quality of sentiment, which are notably fresh and strange.’ Gilman concluded that they exhibited ‘graver tenderness, a more persuasive sobriety, than [MacDowell] had reached before.’
