Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, Op. 95 "From the New World" 
Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904)

THE STORY

     In 1892, Dvořák was living in New York City with his wife and two oldest children, working as director of the National Conservatory of Music. He had been hired to help American composers find their own distinct voices in classical music (a bit ironic, since he was Czech). He concluded that American composers should look to the musical styles found right in their own country—and he shared his opinion widely with the press.
      "The future of this country must be founded upon what are called the Negro melodies," Dvořák declared. "This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States." (American composers largely failed to follow his advice; instead, it was popular music that soaked up African-American influences.)
      After learning African-American spirituals from Harry Burleigh—a young Black singer and student at the conservatory—Dvořák took his own advice and composed his Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” taking inspiration from these songs as well as Native American traditions. 
      With these elements incorporated into Dvořák’s established Bohemian musical style and the European classical tradition, the beloved Symphony No. 9 actually gives us an extraordinary fusion of the Old World and the New World. The symphony was premiered by the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall.

LISTEN FOR

• The transition from the E-minor ending of the first movement to the harmonically distant key of D-flat major in the second movement, via seven shimmering chords (these chords reappear in the fourth movement)

• The second movement’s wistful English horn melody, which later became the spiritual “Goin’ Home” (it is commonly thought that Dvořák quoted the spiritual, but in fact, it was his own work and was only later extracted as a hymn and given words)

• In the third movement, a dancelike passage that supposedly evokes the Native American wedding feast depicted in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Song of Hiawatha”—although it could just as easily be heard as characteristically Czech 

• The jazzy bass line just before the final chords of the work 

INSTRUMENTATION

Piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, strings