December 18, 1860

Edward MacDowell (December 18, 1860 to January 23, 1908) was not just a major American composer; he was, in his time, recognized as such. In 1896 Columbia University offered him a newly created Chair of Music. We have essays put together from notes for his course on a history of music. They were published  as Critical and historical essays: lectures delivered at Columbia university (1912).

This book begins with flourish:

Darwin's theory that music had its origin "in the sounds made by the half-human progenitors of man during the season of courtship" seems for many reasons to be inadequate and untenable. A much more plausible explanation, it seems to me, is to be found in the theory of Theophrastus, in which the origin of music is attributed to the whole range of human emotion.

And we find an Egyptian dimension later.

Herodotus (born 485 B. C.) tells us much about Egyptian music, how the great festival at Bubastis in honour of the Egyptian Diana (Bast or Pascht), to whom the cat was sacred, was attended yearly by 700,000 people who came by water, the boats resounding with the clatter of castanets, the clapping of hands, and the soft tones of thousands of flutes. Again he tells us of music played during banquets, and speaks of a mournful song called Maneros. This, the oldest song of the Egyptians (dating back to the first dynasty), was symbolical of the passing away of life, and was sung in connection with that gruesome custom of bringing in, towards the end of a banquet, an effigy of a corpse to remind the guests... death is the birthright of all mankind...

In 1904 Edward MacDowell  was one in  the first group of  Americans  to constitute  the American Academy of Arts and Letters.