MacDowell's Twelve Virtuoso Etudes

Edward MacDowell's Twelve Virtuoso Etudes for piano solo were composed in 1894. Etude #4 is called Improvisation and is marked "Andantino, Quasi A Piacere".

Edward MacDowell (1860 - 1908) was an American composer and pianist of the Romantic period. He is best known for his second piano concerto and his piano suites Woodland Sketches, Sea Pieces, and New England Idylls. Woodland Sketches includes his most popular short piece To a Wild Rose. MacDowell's compositions included two piano concertos, two orchestral suites, four symphonic poems, four piano sonatas, piano suites, and songs. He also published dozens of piano transcriptions of mostly eighteenth-century keyboard pieces. In 1904, he was one of the first seven Americans honored by membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In 1907, his wife Marian MacDowell founded The MacDowell Colony, an art colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, United States. Since then, an estimated six-thousand artists have been supported in residence, including the winners of at least sixty-one Pulitzer Prizes. The colony has accepted writers, poets, playwrights, artists, and composers.