The Long Read: What Dvorak learned from his American assistant

Joseph Horowitz has written an 11,000-word essay on Harry Burleigh, the black student who guided Antnin Dvorak down the byways of American music. He made a significant contribution to the 9th symphony, ‘From the New World’.

Sample:

He was plied with Dvorak’s questions about African-American life. This was because Dvorak was instantly smitten by the plantation songs that Burleigh, among others, shared with him – music, wholly unanticipated, which Dvorak declared a singular motherlode certain to foster a “great and noble school” of American classical music. He set an example with his New World Symphony (1893), in which Burleigh detected the influence of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” on the G major flute theme of the first movement. The symphony’s most famous melody, beginning the Largo, was assigned to a solo English horn – an instrument whose timbre was said to evoke Burleigh’s baritone. (In the same work, and others composed in the United States, Dvorak’s ear favored the combination of oboe and flute to evoke Native American voices.)

Read the full essay here.

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