The Fiery Debate

About eight months after Antonín Dvořák became director of Jeannette Thurber’s National Conservatory of Music in New York, he weighed in publicly on the question of American musical identity and argued that African American vernacular music (or “negro melodies”) should become the foundation of a national classical style. The New York Herald, which first printed his remarks, stoked a months-long debate that exposed deep-seated anti-Black racism throughout the country’s classical music industry as many musicians rejected the Bohemian’s suggestions outright. Dvořák remained supportive of African American music and musicians but did not fully understand the political implications of his positions.

The Brewing Storm

A small number of US-based composers began experimenting with the use of African American vernacular music as the basis for instrumental works around 1880, arguing that this music formed a truly American folk repertoire. Their works found public favor in the United States and, more importantly, in several European cities in the months leading up to Dvořák’s arrival as director of the National Conservatory. Dvořák’s own position in the debate about American national style was an open question until May 1893, when he revealed his belief in the authentic American identity of Black vernacular music, thus affirming the approach of earlier American composers.

The Aesthetic Conflict

An aesthetic conflict between advocates of abstract instrumental music (or “absolute music”) and advocates of instrumental music that tells stories (or “program music”) raged throughout Europe and the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century. American critics assessed Dvořák’s Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Symphonies through the lens of this conflict as they premiered throughout the 1880s and 1890s. But listeners could not reach a consensus about where along the aesthetic spectrum his music fell. Which direction the composer’s new symphony might take therefore remained an open question until its 1893 world premiere in New York, when the results surprised everyone.

The Welcome Arrival

New York-based philanthropist and entrepreneur Jeannette Thurber (1850–1946) founded the National Conservatory of Music in 1885 to provide a world-class but low-cost professional music education to students from across the United States. Though it progressed in fits and starts, the conservatory eventually earned a congressional charter in 1891, giving it a unique stature compared to national rivals. A year later, Thurber hired Antonín Dvořák, the famous Bohemian composer, to be its executive musical director—easily the highest-profile individual to hold the position. The US public expected Dvořák to transform the National Conservatory into the international powerhouse Thurber had always envisioned.

The Racial Challenge

After the US Civil War, African American musicians and intellectuals had increasingly turned to European classical music as a tool of socioeconomic advancement while acknowledging the importance of antebellum vernacular music for defining racial identity. Violinist and composer Will Marion Cook (1869–1944) used the platform of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition to demonstrate Black achievement in the arts. Meanwhile, Jeannette Thurber and Antonín Dvořák had opened the National Conservatory to Black students free of charge, thus expanding educational opportunities for talented Black musicians. The premiere of the New World Symphony in December 1893 reignited a widespread and vicious public debate about the place of Black music and musicians in American national life.

The National Question

Although European composers had turned to folksongs for inspiration while writing instrumental pieces in the first half of the nineteenth century, their counterparts in the United States were much slower to adopt the practice. Given the country’s ethnically and racially diverse population, musicians did not reach a consensus about what folk music would be most appropriate to project an American national musical identity in the first place. By the early 1890s, however, the leading critic Henry Krehbiel had begun to argue that Antonín Dvořák would help US composers develop a folk-based style during his tenure as director of the National Conservatory.

The Spiritual Aftermath

After Dvořák’s eventual departure from the National Conservatory in 1895, the New World Symphony continued to be a flash point in discussions about the relationships between African American and European American music and musicians, particularly the repertoire known as “Negro spirituals.” White American-born composers, such as Henry F. Gilbert and John Powell, continued to complain about lack of representation on concert programs while failing to support their Black counterparts, who leveraged relationships with figures inside and outside the musical world to create new social networks for finding professional success. In the early 1930s, William Dawson and Florence Price became the first Black composers to premiere symphonies drawing musical inspiration from early African American vernacular song and dance.

The Symphonic Premiere

Bohemian composer Antonín Dvořák’s music reached American shores in the late 1870s and immediately found public favor. Infused with ethnic Bohemian gestures, Dvořák’s smaller character pieces caused the greatest sensation, but critics also welcomed his symphonies as some of the most promising recent examples of the genre. By the time he arrived on US shores to direct Jeannette Thurber’s National Conservatory in September 1892, Dvořák’s protean style had come to please and disappoint listeners in equal measure. An eager public awaited the sounds of his latest symphony, which premiered in December 1893 and would ultimately change the landscape of American classical music forever.