Other Cultural Perspectives in this Era:
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Dvorák's Influence on African-American Art Music
Cultural Perspective 10

Introduction  :   Overview   :   Issues  :   Projects   :   Links

The Bohemian composer Antonín Dvorák was inspired by traditional music of America (as well as of his native Bohemia)—specifically, spirituals, Creole tunes and dances, and what he perceived as music of Native Americans. Yet there is little in the New World Symphony that is reminiscent of actual Native American music, although, as we have learned, the two middle movements can be linked with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem The Song of Hiawatha.

What, then, of Dvorák's professed interest in the traditional music of African Americans? We know that the composer came to love the spirituals sung to him by his student Henry Burleigh (1866–1949), and he supposedly had a particular fondness for Swing Low, Sweet Chariot (a variant of this spiritual can be heard in the first movement of the symphony). The rhythmic syncopations and the particular scale formations used in the New World Symphony (the minor mode with a lowered, or flatted, seventh degree) have often been cited as evidence of borrowings from African-American musical styles.

But Dvorák gave much more to American music than he took from it. As a respected teacher, he issued a challenge to American composers to throw off the domination of European music and forge a path of their own, using the "beautiful and varied themes . . . the folk songs of America." Some followed his suggestion, including two of his African-American students. Burleigh published a landmark collection of spirituals arranged in an art music style (Jubilee Songs of the U.S.A., 1916, which included Deep River); his goal was to bring the genre to the concert stage. Will Marion Cook (1869–1944), while a student in Dvorák's composition class, began an opera on Uncle Tom's Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel about life under slavery), but then turned his efforts to musical theater.

Florence Price (1888–1953), the first African-American woman to be recognized as a distinguished composer, is believed to have drawn inspiration for her Symphony in E minor (1932) directly from Dvorák's New World Symphony. Price's work parallels Dvorák's in a number of ways, including original themes that allude to characteristic African-American rhythms and melodies.

The composer who best rose to Dvorák's challenge was William Grant Still (1895–1978), whose output exceeds one hundred concert works in a wide variety of genres—symphonies, symphonic poems, suites, operas, ballets, chamber music, choral music, and songs. A nationalist, Still drew musical inspiration from African-American work songs, spirituals, ragtime, blues, and jazz. For his Afro-American Symphony (1930), his best-known work today, Still stated his goal clearly: "I knew I wanted to write a symphony, I knew that it had to be an American work; and I wanted to demonstrate how the blues, so often considered a lowly expression, could be elevated to the highest musical level." Although not the first symphonic work written in a jazz or blues style (George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue was premiered in 1924), Still's symphony was firmly rooted in the music of his African-American heritage.

Dvorák would surely have welcomed these examples of musical nationalism, which were products of an early twentieth-century movement often referred to as the Black, or Harlem, Renaissance. Today, the “validation" of a vernacular music by art music standards described by William Grant Still is no longer necessary, since all musics are coming to be accepted as valuable products of the culture and people who created them.

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Overview:
This Cultural Perspective explores the question of nationalism from a uniquely American perspective. It explains how a Czech nationalist helped to define the way that American composers thought about American music. The essay focuses on Antonín Dvorák's call to American composers to use American musical materials, especially those of the African-American and Native American traditions. A number of African-American composers (some students of Dvorák) took up this challenge.

Issues:
How was "American Music" defined in the nineteenth century? Much of our art music tradition had come from Europe; and Jazz, our most distinctly American music, was yet to be born. Dvorák pointed American composers to indigenous themes. For African-American composers, that meant the music of their culture. For Amy Beach, on the other hand, that meant the folk music of the Anglo-Irish tradition that was her heritage. How would you build an American Nationalist style? You might begin by asking the same questions a Czech composer like Dvorák would ask:

• What are the sources of our musical style?
• What are the national events to be celebrated?
• What are the national stories to be told?
• What are the qualities of the land to be portrayed?

Projects:
You can't go out and write "the Great American Symphony," but you can start listening to American art music with a more critical ear. As you listen to more American music in the next unit, see how composers such as Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein answer the questions posed above. In the meantime, use the links below to explore one of the richest outpourings of purely American art, the Harlem Renaissance.

Links:

• The Harlem Renaissance
  A brief but useful introduction to the writers and painters of this marvelous artistic era. Includes many examples by these authors and artists. You might want to revisit the section on Langston Hughes, because the owner of the site rotates the poems available.
• The Harlem Renaissance: An Online Forum
  An on-line dialogue presented by PBS's News Hour. The site includes a brief discussion of issues surrounding the Harlem Renaissance with thoughtful commentary by scholars in the field. There are also a number of links to transcripts of related News Hour features that provide more background on the artists of the time.
• Still Going On: An Exhibit Celebrating the Life and Times of William Grant Still
  Still was perhaps the greatest composer to come out of the flowering of African-American creativity at the beginning of the century. This exhibit is sponsored by the Duke University Special Collections Library. It contains a detailed biographical portrait of the composer along with many images. There is a good discussion of Still's Afro-American Symphony with audio clips.

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