From the New World Premieres

In New York in 1893, Dvořák put spirituals and Native American turns into a symphony and asked what American music could be.

Related

RomanticSymphonyThemeEnglish Horn

Time and place

16 December 1893, New York, at Carnegie Hall. Anton Seidl conducted the New York Philharmonic in the first performance of Dvořák's Ninth Symphony, From the New World. The hall's archive notes that a public performance the previous evening had already let the work sound once.

What happened

Dvořák wrote it while directing the National Conservatory in New York. The first movement opens with a horn call and a second theme with pentatonic and spiritual-like turns. The slow movement gives the melody to an English horn, a tune like a song without words. The scherzo moves with the spring of a folk dance; the finale gathers the earlier themes. Dvořák did not quote folk songs directly; he took their scales, rhythms and phrasing apart and built his own themes.

What changed

A European composer writing an American symphony put the question on the table: what material should American art music use. Dvořák argued publicly that African American spirituals and Native American music should be a foundation, a claim that provoked debate and influenced later American composers. The slow movement was later fitted with words as Goin' Home and reached a wider public.

Listen to the turn

Begin with the horn call of the first movement, short, rising, like a signal to assemble. Then the slow movement, where the English horn spins a pentatonic line over string chords in long phrases. Finally the finale, as the earlier themes return and the brass push to its peak. Three kinds of material, three accents from the same ground.

Related

This turn belongs to Romantic; see Symphony and Theme, and English Horn.

Sources

• Grove Music Online, entry "Symphony No. 9, From the New World" — premiere and sources checked, not quoted
• Michael B. Beckerman, New Worlds of Dvořák (W. W. Norton) — American context checked, not quoted

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.