From Whose World?

Imagine you’re Antonín Dvořák in the early 1890s, on a boat from Europe bound for New York. Your duties when you arrive will be to take over as director of the relatively new National Conservatory of Music, which has a policy of admitting women and people of color in addition to young white men. You plan to immerse yourself in the culture of the United States with the hope of writ­ing a new kind of symphony that is borne from an original American character and not simply derivative of the orchestral standards being imported from Europe.

Today, the simplest thing to say about America is that America is a lot of things: sprawling, diverse, and enter­prising; constructive and destructive at once. Its future feels unclear, and its past is defined by sets of nuances and contradictions far too difficult to catalog. America is tribes of indigenous societ­ies, enslaved people stolen from faraway lands, offspring of immigrants seeking wealth or fleeing conflict or escaping destitution. It’s home to boundless farmland and New York brownstones; to free refills and spin classes; to Amish churches and Airbnb. Especially since the Industrial Revolution, America has come to char­acterize the shift from a sectarian world to an inextricably connected one, finally coming close to its “melting pot” prom­ise where culture, origin, and creed are blended and increasingly nebulous.

So of course Dvořák had a problem, even 130 years ago. What on earth does America sound like? What is “American,” anyway? It’s a question without an answer, or at best a very limited one. And the result of Dvořák’s mission to create this new kind of symphony can be sliced countless ways, derided or cele­brated (or a million things in between) from a host of per­spectives as diverse as America itself.

Here in contemporary America, as we grapple with issues of authenticity, appro­priation, and heterogeneity, there’s perhaps no better time to reevaluate Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony, “From the New World.” Dvořák was famously intrigued by African American music during his years in America, and the “New World” Symphony was a supposition that the “future music” of the country must begin with the culture of this marginalized and disenfranchised population. But can—or should—a Czech composer say anything about the musical identity of an entire foreign nation? Can—or should—a white European artist incorporate ideas into his work that originate from a culture he is not part of? Are can and should the best questions to ask, or is it better to discuss what happens when?

Dvořák’s American Ideal

When Dvořák tackled questions like those during his time in America, he got a lot of answers. Today, debate about Dvořák’s intentions and the reception his “New World” Symphony received is varied and heated.

For years, the stan­dard story was that Dvořák, an outsider, came to discover something about American culture that most Americans couldn’t (or wouldn’t) see themselves: that African American music is the true voice of the country. This revelation came from Dvořák’s interactions with the young Black con­servatory student Harry T. Burleigh, who sang spirituals to the fascinated composer. And when the symphony pre­miered and Dvořák proclaimed its suc­cess, he was forced to defend his (at the time) progressive thesis from an unconvinced populace.

Most of the basic facts in this story are true, but there’s quite a bit of untold nuance. While the “New World” Symphony may be among the most significant affirmations of African American culture in the otherwise European world of the concert hall, it was not the first; composer George Whiting argued for the “high culture” validity of Creole music in the mid-1800s, and conductor Franz Xavier Arens toured Europe with a program of American music (much of it inspired by African American idioms) that became a hot topic throughout the continent—before Dvořák even left for New York. While Dvořák wrote newspaper articles explaining his musical outlook on America, he also said “America will have to reflect the influence of the great German composers, just as all countries do,” and once wrote “leave out that non­sense about my using Indian and American motifs—it is a lie!”

But the most glaring issues with the standard “New World” mythology are those that were drummed up in the 1890s and haven’t been changed or reconsidered since. Consider Dvořák’s observation that “the music of the negroes and of the Indians was practically identical,” and that “the music of the two races bore a remark­able similarity to the music of Scotland”—an outlandish takeaway by today’s standards, but not contextualized enough to dispel the myth that the piece makes several “authentic” references to African American and Native American music and culture. Or look no further than the common title of the piece: “New World,” a dated, Eurocentric phrase that creates a land of otherness on the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean. While few would argue it’s fair to judge an 1893 work by 2026 standards, we’ve learned a lot in those 130+ years. We ought to use those lessons to better understand Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 rather than take it—and its dated legends—at face value.

As an advocate of historically marginalized composers, musicologist Douglas Shadle is a leading voice in public discussions about the role of symphony orchestras and orchestral music in American life. Shadle's 2021 program note on the "New World" Symphony further contextualizes the work:

Few things spark a more spirited discussion than trying to define what it means to be American. Antonín Dvořák found that out the hard way in May 1893, when he told a reporter for the New York Herald that he believed a truly American classical style should be built on African American folk music. The famous Bohemian composer had arrived in the United States only a few months earlier to take over as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, a relatively new venture funded by the progressive philanthropist Jeannette Thurber. Dvořák encountered the multicultural musical soundscape of New York and became convinced that the repertoire of spirituals, sorrow songs, Creole songs, and other styles of the African diaspora would prove to be the greatest source of inspiration for the next generation of American composers. Most white classical musicians disagreed—strongly.

Perhaps the one defining property of American identity is its resistance to firm definition. Our political landscape still crackles with sharp disagreement about who or what “counts” as American, or how American history should be told. In the 1890s, those questions were as pertinent as ever. New constitutional amendments granted civil rights to African Americans, but state and local governments routinely eroded these rights. The military attacked and displaced Indigenous peoples. The federal government curbed immigration from Asia. Yet these groups were each making essential contributions—social, economic, and cultural—to the contours of American life that remain with us today. Dvořák wanted to channel that vitality into musical expression, the first result of which was his Ninth Symphony, “From the New World.”

The “New World” Symphony, as it is often called, is one of the most frequently performed pieces of classical music ever written. The directness of its expression makes it immediately accessible, while its emotional breadth aligns with the composer’s kaleidoscope of influences. A theme sounded by the flute in the first movement echoes the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” a song Dvořák learned from the African American baritone vocalist Harry T. Burleigh, a student at the conservatory and his one-time assistant. And it’s possible that the plaintive English horn melody of the Largo movement evokes the timbre of Burleigh’s voice. At the same time, we know that Dvořák was deeply inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, a subject he wanted to transform into an opera. The musicologist Michael Beckerman has shown that the Largo movement corresponds to “Hiawatha’s wooing,” while the scherzo depicts “Hiawatha’s wedding feast,” including the whirling dance of Pau-Puk Keewis. Although there is no concrete evidence proving it, Beckerman thinks that we might hear the finale as the great battle between Pau-Puk Keewis and Hiawatha.

In an age of ubiquitous cinematic media, it is easy for us “hear” vivid stories in Dvořák’s symphony—either those from Longfellow’s poem or some of our own creation. The work’s original audiences had a far more difficult time. No one could decide if the music sounded truly American, or if it belonged to some other place altogether; situating it for a story was impossible. For Dvořák, however, the piece was the beginning of something new, not the final word. It might open the door to fresh channels of creative expression. Dvořák’s student, the African American composer Will Marion Cook, once explained that Dvořák could not adequately capture the inner meanings of Black music as someone who had lived through the unthinkable struggles out of which it arose. “Soon, perhaps,” Cook wrote, thinking about the symphony, “will some native composer, hopefully of the future, take the pen, inspired by long repressed imagination, and paint glowing tone pictures of a radiant dawn—a dawn without passing—a day without a night.” And so the “New World” Symphony, like America itself, lives in a constant state of becoming. Both point continually toward new visions, toward a dawn without passing, and a day without a night.