Daniel Gregory Mason

After 1907, Mason began devoting significant time to composition, studying with Vincent D'Indy in Paris in 1913, garnering numerous honorary doctorates and winning prizes from the Society for the Publication of American Music and the Juilliard Foundation.

Retrospective analysts of Mason's career have observed that his conservative aesthetic opinions were intertwined with "troubling" rhetoric about national, racial, and religious identity.

[4][5][6][7] Mason insisted that America's culture was "Anglo-Saxon" at its core and must not be corrupted by foreign, particularly Jewish and African, influences, such as jazz and ragtime.

[8] Although he co-signed a 1921 open letter condemning "a campaign of anti-Semitism in this country" and affirming "the loyalty and patriotism of our fellow citizens of the Jewish faith,"[9] he had written only two months earlier: The Oriental, especially the Jewish, infection in our music, seemingly less widespread than the German was or the French is, may prove even more virulent...

The insidiousness of the Jewish menace to our artistic integrity is due partly to the speciousness of Hebrew art, its brilliance, its violently juxtaposed extremes of passion, its poignant eroticism and pessimism, and partly to the fact that the strain in us which might make head against it, the deepest, most fundamental strain perhaps in our mixed nature, is diluted and confused by a hundred other tendencies.