![]() Perhaps the most extreme view was voiced by Leonard Bernstein, who devoted a chapter of his 1966 book The Infinite Variety of Music to arguing that there was virtually nothing American about the Symphony. Anyone with a ‘nose’ for these things will detect the influence of America.”īut many observers, nasally challenged or not, have disagreed. Dvořák wrote to a friend in Bohemia that the Symphony “will be fundamentally different from my earlier ones. But it also sounds different from his previous works. Dvořák was not going to change his style in nine months. In the ensuing century, little has changed: the symphony’s popularity has endured, and talking about how much the “New World” Symphony sounded like what American music was before American music started to sound like the “New World” Symphony remains a favorite pastime.Ĭlearly there is a lot of Bohemia in the Symphony. Its reception was a major triumph, and it occasioned much enthusiastic discussion from the musical intelligentsia about just how American it really was. The first performance, in New York on December 16, 1893, was a major event, with a public rehearsal and much advance press attention. He made a special point of having Harry Burleigh, a black National Conservatory student who later became famous as a publisher of spirituals, sing real black music to him.ĭvořák began the symphony in late 1892 and finished it the following May. He would have come to know black music from more varied sources. His knowledge of “Indian” music would have come from published collections, filtered through the ears of white editors. In interviews with New York newspapers, he opined that the music of native Americans and Black people would be the real source of folk music on which to base an American national style. Since Dvořák was a “nationalist” who grounded his own music in Czech folk tradition, he was naturally curious about the folk music of America. Dvořák arrived with his wife and two oldest children in September 1892, and threw himself into teaching, composing, and absorbing America. To this end, a visionary patron of the arts named Jeanette Thurber founded a National Conservatory in New York and engaged Dvořák as its director. ![]() This ultimate piece of Americana actually grew out of an attempt to create an American style of composition. So much in it has been quoted and rehashed that it now sounds like a cliché. Has there ever been a work so beloved, so recognized, and yet so impossible to give a fair hearing as the “New World” Symphony? By the mid-20th century it was so much a part of American culture that it was familiar to people who had never even heard it.
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