Woodland Sketches

It was written during an 1896 stay at MacDowell's summer retreat in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where each piece was inspired by a different aspect of the surrounding nature and landscape.

While some pieces are notable for their use of impressionistic techniques in depicting the New England wilderness, others are based on elements from Native American and Southern music.

In 1896, MacDowell and his wife Marian fulfilled their dream of owning a country home with the purchase of a farm in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

I can only work as I feel, and sometimes accomplish nothing at all when I have felt that I was beautifully primed up...[3]At the suggestion of his wife, MacDowell recovered one of the thrown-away pieces and titled it "To a Wild Rose".

[6] The appeal of MacDowell's pieces was due in part to their accessibility to amateur pianists during a time when many households owned a piano.

[14] The suite's first piece, "To a Wild Rose", is "MacDowell's best known single work" according to the musicologist H. Wiley Hitchcock,[15] and it achieved what Bomberger described as "phenomenal popularity".

[20] The music historian Neil Leonard cited "Will o' the Wisp" as an example of MacDowell's "concern for atmospheric effects" in depicting the titular lights with his impressionistic and economic style.

[24] These melodies are compiled in the musicologist Theodore Baker's 1882 German dissertation Über die Musik der nordamerikanischen Wilden (English: On the Music of the North American Indians), which MacDowell received in 1891.

The piece is mostly played on the black keys, with a meter change in the short middle section between two rounds of the opening passage scored on three staffs.

[29] "From Uncle Remus" reflects MacDowell's nostalgia from reading Joel Chandler Harris' stories of the titular African American.

In the piece, MacDowell attempts to imitate the banjo and elements of Southern culture despite never having directly experienced the American South.

[30] This is contrasted by a middle section in the major key, marked "pianissimo as heard from afar" to indicate echoes from past barn dances.

A more expressive form of the theme from "A Deserted Farm" returns before reaching the piece's conclusion: silence followed by stern chords from the introduction to "From an Indian Lodge" that begin soft but finish in fortissimo.

[35] He later wrote that in Woodland Sketches, MacDowell's speech "assumes for the first time some of its most engaging and distinctive characteristics" and that the pieces "have an inescapable fragrance, tenderness, and zest".

[36] Gilman recognized "At an Old Trysting-place", "From an Indian Lodge", "To a Water-lily", "A Deserted Farm", and "Told at Sunset" to be pieces of "a different calibre", remarkable for their "richness of emotion", "dramatic purpose", and "tactful reticence".