It seems that some passages of Dvorak’s New World Symphony have been inspired from some American folk songs. If so, which ones ?
jayjay
August 6, 2008, 8:26pm
2
According to Classical Notes , Dvorak’s New World Symphony didn’t actually use any American folk melodies.
Resemblance to the atmosphere of Dvorak’s prior work suggested to some commentators that the work was most heavily influenced by nostalgia for his beloved Bohemia. But assuming that Dvorak had set out to practice what he preached, others seized upon the prevalence of the syncopated rhythms, pentatonic scales and flattened sevenths of our native music to find a closer tie to America. They noted Dvorak’s fascination with the Hiawatha legend and traced the symphony’s largo and scherzo to scenes of the funeral and celebratory feast from an opera he had sketched but never pursued. They found especially significant the resemblance of a principal theme of the first movement to “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” reportedly one of Dvorak’s favorite spirituals. But such speculation has its dangers – it’s hard to find much meaning in the far more striking resemblance of a motif in the finale to “Three Blind Mice.” And subsequent critics who went so far as to assert that Dvorak copied his largo from a hymn, “Goin’ Home,” were chagrined to realize that the song arose only decades later when lyrics were grafted onto Dvorak’s original theme.
The composer himself derided as “nonsense” claims that he used actual Indian- or African-American tunes and insisted that he only wrote “in the spirit” of native American music. In a delightful 1956 lecture (included in his The Infinite Variety of Music (Simon and Schuster, 1966)), Leonard Bernstein examined each of the themes, traced their origin to French, Scottish, German, Chinese and, of course, Czech sources, and concluded that the only accurate assessment was to consider the work multi-national. But as New York critic James Huneker pointed out in a discerning review of the premiere, the “New World” Symphony was distinctly American in the sense of being a composite, reflecting our melting-pot society. Indeed, much the same could be said for our culture generally – it’s made of foreign ingredients but emerges from the cauldron with a clear American flavor.
(I think that’s safe. It’s two paragraphs of a 16-paragraph article.)
villa
August 6, 2008, 8:32pm
3
I think you are mistaken. It was clearly based on a commercial for Hovis bread.
Thank you Jayjay. It’s interesting that this has been discussed before. I will take time to read the whole article.
And it has, in turn, inspired some new ones!Largo
Before a performance of the 9th, I saw a music historian give a lecture about Dvorak and his particular interest in the Longfellow poem “The Song of Hiawatha” as inspiration for the piece. The lecturer even played some sections of the symphony while reciting extended stanzas of the poem and made a very convincing case, I thought, for how some of the passages fit well with the music. From wiki:
Antonín Dvořák was familiar with the work in Czech translation. In an article published in the New York Herald on December 15, 1893, he stated that the second movement of his Symphony No. 9, From the New World, was a “sketch or study for a later work, either a cantata or opera … which will be based upon Longfellow’s Hiawatha” and that the third movement scherzo was “suggested by the scene at the feast in Hiawatha where the Indians dance.”
Curiously enough, Dvořák claimed that “the music of the negroes and of the Indians was practically identical,” and some passages that suggest African-American spirituals to modern ears may have been intended by Dvořák to evoke a Native American ambience.
Dvorak spent one summer in the Czech settlement of Spillville in Winneshiek County, 15 or 20 miles north of here. The local traditional story is that he did some of the preliminary sketches during the Spillville Summer and that one passage in Aus der Neuen Weldt is based on bird songs he heard while strolling along the upper reaches of the Turkey River. A Bohemian Grosbeak, perhaps?
Dvorak spent one summer in the Czech settlement of Spillville in Winneshiek County, 15 or 20 miles north of here. The local traditional story is that he did some of the preliminary sketches during the Spillville Summer and that one passage in Aus der Neuen Weldt is based on bird songs he heard while strolling along the upper reaches of the Turkey River. A Bohemian Grosbeak, perhaps?
To nit pick, as this poster makes it clear, the proper name of this piece of music is not The New World , but From The New World . This is a subtle difference in meaning between these two titles.