Department of Music Lecture: Douglas Shadle, Asst Professor of Musicology, Vanderbilt University

Since its premiere in 1893, Antonín Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony, “From the New World,” has gradually assumed a curious role as an instrument of cultural diplomacy. The story of its genesis—a visitor from abroad shows eager foreigners how to develop a national musical voice—certainly adds a “feel good” dimension to the work’s idiosyncratic stylistic charm. Today it regularly appears on international tours given by orchestras from the United States, Central Europe, and East Asia alike. But this happy symbolic function belies a fraught history.

A few months before the symphony’s premiere, Dvořák claimed rather brazenly that the melodies of slave spirituals ought to become the foundation of a distinctly American compositional style. Debates about the viability of his position raged for months in the musical and popular press. One hardline faction denied the “Americanness” of slaves and their descendants, while another believed that slaves were in fact quintessentially American. Elements of this antagonistic debate predictably spilled over into the reception of the new symphony, which was allegedly a manifestation of Dvořák’s provocative ideas. Instead of assessing the effectiveness of his compositional strategy, however, certain critics flatly denied the presence of African American melodies—or even an African American musical ethos—and thus erased one of the work’s chief sources of influence. Sadly, strains of this critical discourse have persisted among commentators throughout the United States and Europe, and the work’s current status as a diplomatic instrument has little to do with its original conception.

We have long recognized that the United States and its heterogeneous musical cultures had a profound impact on Dvořák himself. But Dvořák was really only a bit player in a larger ongoing drama. In this presentation, I recover and examine two intertwined discursive threads that arose in the years surrounding Dvořák’s American residency: (1) the place of African American music within “mainstream” orchestral composition and (2) the responses to Dvořák’s ideas among African American musicians and intellectuals. Ultimately, I argue that the purposeful erasure of the African American influence on Dvořák had palpable negative ramifications for the African American composers who later adopted his stylistic suggestions—a consequence that directly challenges the efficacy of the “New World” Symphony as an instrument of neighborly diplomacy.