At the end it was vast and glaringly white, and except for an upright piano and a few chairs placed near the lecturer's table the room was empty.

Ten or twelve undergraduates, youths of eighteen or twenty, and twenty or more special students and auditors, chiefly women, were gathered here.

The first lectures, treating of the archaic beginnings of music, might have easily fallen into a business-like recital of dates, but Professor MacDowell never sank into the passionless routine of lecture giving.

His were not the pedantic discourses students link most often to university chairs.
They were beautifully illuminating talks, delivered with so much freedom and such a rush of enthusiasm that one felt that the hour never held all that wanted to be said, and the abundant knowledge, in its longing to get out, kept spilling over into the to-morrows.
"His ideas were not tied up in a manuscript, nor doled out from notes.
They came untrammelled from a wonderfully versatile mind, and were illustrated with countless musical quotations and interlined with a wealth of literary and historical references.

There was no regular textbook; some students carried a Rockstro or a Hunt, but the majority depended upon the references made during the lectures.