Ithaca College

Hosted by the Elizabethtown College Department of Fine and Performing Arts to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the birth of MacDowell, the Edward MacDowell Festival and Symposium was held December 3-5, 2010. 

Radice’s presentation focused on MacDowell’s years at Columbia University (1896–1904), when he served as the first Professor of Music in the history of that institution, and the years 1969 to 1989, when Chou Wen-chung (b. 1923) served in a similar capacity at that same institution. Radice examined three issues that affected both composers: (1) the role of music as an academic discipline in higher education, (2) the impact of academe on the respective musical outputs of MacDowell and Chou, and (3) the role of nationalism in the music of both.