r. E. Douglas Bomberger, a professor of music and department chair at Elizabethtown College, first encountered Edward MacDowell’s music as a high school piano student. MacDowell’s music stuck with him throughout his later schooling and into his career. Since then, Bomberger has focused much of academic his research on MacDowell’s life and musical career.
He has conducted research and written about MacDowell for over two decades. Earlier this year, Bomberger published his biography, titled “MacDowell.” He agreed to present some of his research on MacDowell’s career in a lecture for the Faculty Scholarship Series titled “Like a Dog Standing on its Hind Legs: Edward MacDowell and the music program at Columbia,” on Tuesday Oct. 1 at 7 p.m.
The presentation focused on MacDowell’s position as the chair of Columbia University’s newly founded music department. MacDowell was asked to take the position in 1896 and held the chair for eight years. He created the department’s entire curriculum completely from scratch.
Bomberger’s past research into MacDowell’s career prompted his fellow MacDowell scholar Margery Lowens to contact him about the possibility of writing a biography. She offered to share source materials that she had accumulated since the mid-1960s. “Her materials were so valuable that I dedicated the book to her in appreciation,” Bomberger said.
During the research process for the biography, Bomberger visited research centers with major collections of MacDowell materials and primary source documents, including the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library and Columbia University. He also made research trips to Germany, France and Canada to track down more obscure source material. “There were many unexpected surprises as I discovered new source material,” Bomberger said. “There were disappointments at things I hoped to find but never did. Writing is hard work, but I would not say that this project had unusual difficulties.”
The writing itself was a far more intricate process. “After thinking about the organization for a long time, I created a tentative list of chapters to plot the narrative arc of the book,” Bomberger said. He began writing the book while he was on sabbatical during the fall 2009 semester. His research had sent him to Germany just before he started writing the manuscript. This caused him to begin writing the manuscript starting with chapter four, which deals with MacDowell’s years as a German conservatory student. After that, Bomberger worked backward to write the first three chapters before continuing on with chapter five.
The biography provides insight into MacDowell’s early life, as his later life has been researched extensively in the last century. Far less light has been shed on his earlier life before now. Because of this, Bomberger devoted more space to the composer’s early life, which gave him the opportunity to share new insights and information about MacDowell’s upbringing, his father’s business and the challenges of studying at the Paris Conservatory. “The later years will also contain some new perspectives for those familiar with his story,” Bomberger said.
MacDowell and his work are very important pieces of the history of American music. He was the first classical composer from the United States to achieve a major international reputation. “Most critics writing between about 1890 and 1920 would have considered him America’s greatest composer,” Bomberger said.
Bomberger plans to move on to other projects and different research in the near future. “I intend to write a couple more articles exploring issues too specialized to address in a biography,” he said. “But after they are done I will be eager to move on to new projects.”
Bomberger received his bachelor’s degree from Goshen College, his master’s degree in music from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his doctorate from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. His primary area of study is music history.
