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Tuesday, February 04, 2025

Yes, I want to learn about it.

"The Symphony No. 9 in E minor, "From the New World", Op. 95, B. 178 (Czech: Symfonie č. 9 e moll "Z nového světa"), also known as the New World Symphony, was composed by Antonín Dvořák in 1893 while he was the director of the National Conservatory of Music of America from 1892 to 1895. It premiered in New York City on 16 December 1893.[1] It is one of the most popular of all symphonies.[2] In older literature and recordings, this symphony was – as for its first publication – numbered as Symphony No. 5. The symphony was completed in the building that now houses the Bily Clocks Museum in Spillville, Iowa.[3]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._9_(Dvo%C5%99%C3%A1k)

"Dvořák: Symphony No. 9 From the New World" | Paavo Järvi and the Tonhalle Orchester Zürich

https://youtube.com/watch?v=uOmaQSqnPfw&si=IJZaLIVv-UYQnoQ1

SYMPHONY 

"Dvořák was interested in Native American music and the African-American spirituals he heard in North America. While director of the National Conservatory he encountered an African-American student, Harry T. Burleigh, who sang traditional spirituals to him. Burleigh, later a composer himself, said that Dvořák had absorbed their "spirit" before writing his own melodies.[6] Dvořák stated:

I am convinced that the future music of this country must be founded on what are called Negro melodies. These can be the foundation of a serious and original school of composition, to be developed in the United States. These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are the folk songs of America and your composers must turn to them.[7]

The symphony was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, and premiered on 16 December 1893, at Carnegie Hall conducted by Anton Seidl. A day earlier, in an article published in the New York Herald on 15 December 1893, Dvořák further explained how Native American music influenced his symphony:

I have not actually used any of the [Native American] melodies. I have simply written original themes embodying the peculiarities of the Indian music, and, using these themes as subjects, have developed them with all the resources of modern rhythms, counterpoint, and orchestral colour.[8]

In the same article, Dvořák stated that he regarded the symphony's second movement as a "sketch or study for a later work, either a cantata or opera ... which will be based upon Longfellow's Hiawatha"[9] (Dvořák never actually wrote such a piece).[9] He also wrote that the third movement scherzo was "suggested by the scene at the feast in Hiawatha where the Indians dance".[9]

In 1893, a newspaper interview quoted Dvořák as saying "I found 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".[10][11] Most historians agree that Dvořák is referring to the pentatonic scale, which is typical of each of these musical traditions.[12]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._9_(Dvo%C5%99%C3%A1k)

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