His harmonic method is ingenious and pliable. An over-insistence upon certain formulas--eloquent enough in themselves--has been charged against it, and the accusation is not without foundation. MacDowell is exceedingly fond, for instance, of suspensions in the chord of the diminished seventh. There is scarcely a page throughout his later work in which one does not encounter this effect in but slightly varied form. Yet there is a continual richness in his harmonic texture. I can think of no other composer, save Wagner, whose chord-progressions are so full and opulent in colour. His tonal web is always densely woven--he avoids "thinness" as he avoids the banal phrase and the futile decoration. In addition to the plangency of his chord combinations, as such, his polyphonic skill is responsible for much of the solidity of his fabric. His pages, particularly in the more recent works, are studded with examples of felicitous and dexterous counterpoint--poetically significant, and of the most elastic and untrammelled contrivance. Even in passages of a merely episodic character, one is struck with the vitality and importance of his inner voices. Dissonance--in the sense in which we understand dissonance to-day--plays a comparatively unimportant part in his technical method. The climax of the second of the "Sea Pieces"--"From a Wandering Iceberg"--marks about as extreme a point of harmonic conflict as he ever touches. Nor has he been profoundly affected by the passion for unbridled chromaticism engendered in modern music by the procedures of Chopin, Liszt, and Wagner. Even in the earlier of the orchestral works, "Hamlet and Ophelia" and "Lancelot and Elaine"--both written in Germany in the days when the genius of Wagner was an ambient and inescapable flame--the writing is comparatively free from chromatic effects. On the other hand, he is far less audaciously diatonic than Richard Strauss. His style is, in fact, a subtle blend of opposing tendencies.