Lawrence Gilman's 'Edward MacDowell' presents a sympathetic and illuminating study of the composer and his work. II One of the rocks upon which the high character of modern American music is founded is the art-activity of Edgar Stillman-Kelley (b. April 14, 1857). While he has not given forth his compositions in rapid succession or in great quantity, he has, nevertheless, struck a series of telling blows for the honor and dignity of creative musical art in America. Especially is this true in view of the fact that he has formulated, maintained and promulgated definite ideals of music throughout a period which has been characterized mainly, in this respect, by confusion and groping, and, too frequently, even by grovelling. In a post-Wagnerian period in which vacillation, obscurity, and disorder have reigned throughout a large part of the musical world, he has steadily advanced the standard of lucidity, order, and faith. Lofty in imagination, of a high sense of beauty, and at the same time exceptional in scholarship and breadth of intellectual vision, he combines qualities which must necessarily single him out as a leader of importance in the musical movement to which America has given birth. The same qualities have also fitted him to exercise a beneficent influence, in certain directions, upon more recent and newly appearing phases of native musical evolution. It has been Stillman-Kelley's fate that both his name and his influence have outdistanced the general knowledge of his works. Two circumstances may be held accountable for this: the fact that he has given out no quantity of works in small forms through which his music might become accessible to music-lovers everywhere through the universal medium of the piano, and the further fact that it is particularly in just such forms as Stillman-Kelley has produced that, as a nation, we are slow in giving our own composers a wide hearing. The American symphony, on American programs, must wait, first, and perhaps rightfully, upon the classics, and, second, and often with bitter wrong, upon the sensational European novelties of the hour.