U.S. Navy CPO Graham Jackson, with tears of grief, plays
"Goin' Home," from Dvorak's 'New World' Symphony, as President Franklin
D. Roosevelt's body is carried from Warm Springs, Ga., where he died.
Ed Clark/Life Picture Collection/Getty
John Malveaux of
writes:
A foreigner discovered the Negro Spiritual as a basis for authentic American classical music.
Thanks
John
National Public Radio
Deceptive Cadence
November 24, 2018 8:02 AM ET
Heard on Weekend Edition Saturday
Tom Huizenga
This story is part of American Anthem, a yearlong series on songs that rouse, unite, celebrate and call to action. Find more at NPR.org/Anthem.
Sometimes it takes an outsider to point out what's great about a culture. That's exactly what Czech composer Antonin Dvorak was when he came to the U.S. at the end of the 19th century, an immigrant thrown into a new world and new sounds.
Out
of that experience, he wrote a symphony for America: Dvorak's Symphony
No. 9, subtitled "From the New World," has become one of the world's
most beloved orchestral works. It also produced a melody that is a hymn
and an anthem to what American music can be.
When Dvorak came
to America in 1892, the Pledge of Allegiance was new. So were Carnegie
Hall, the game of basketball and Edison's wax cylinders. Classical music
in America wasn't new — but it needed a reboot. Already a
celebrated composer in Europe, Dvorak was hired to run the National
Conservatory of Music in New York to help American composers find their
own voices and shake off the European sound.
At the time, American concert music sounded a lot like Brahms and Beethoven. Dvorak heard something different, in an unexpected place, as he told the New York Herald just before he debuted his "New World" symphony.
"The
future of this country must be founded upon what are called the Negro
melodies," he declared. "This must be the real foundation of any serious
and original school of composition to be developed in the United
States." Essentially, this was Dvorak telling white Americans that the
future of their music resided in the people they had subjugated and
killed.
"It was radical, and I think that he got harshly criticized and really rejected," says JoAnn Falletta,
music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, who has conducted the "New
World" Symphony many times. "Dvorak was surprised, in a way, to find
that the roots of American music were not European, they were
African-American."
The music he found here included
African-American spirituals, introduced to him by a young black man
named Harry Burleigh, who had applied to be a student at Dvorak's
National Conservatory.
"Dvorak chose a black person to be his assistant. How likely is that?" says Joe Horowitz, author of the book Classical Music in America,
noting that this was, after all, America in the 1890s. "He's probably
thinking at least two things: 'I want to help this young black man,' and
'This young black man is going to help me.' "
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