Dvořák’s “New World” Program Notes

Aaron Copland’s The Tender Land Suite

World Premiere April 1, 1954; New York, New York
19 Minutes

Aaron Copland synthesized an American sound with an attractive modernist approach.
His father was Jewish and anglicized the surname Kaplan when he immigrated.
His film score to The Heiress (1949) won an OSCAR® at the Academy Awards.

Aaron Copland’s most beloved music is associated with the ballet stage: Appalachian Spring, Rodeo and Billy the Kid. Their music is filled with the “Mom and apple pie” spirit of Americana that we love best in his works.

The legendary Broadway partners Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II commissioned Copland to write his second opera, The Tender Land, in 1953. Using a libretto based on James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the opera focused on the farming culture of the American Midwest: a perfect backdrop for Copland’s inviting, folksy style. Copland extracted a symphonic suite for orchestral performance in 1958.

At the heart of The Tender Land lies an unlikely romance between a high school senior and a drifter doing odd jobs on her family’s farm. The Suite opens with the instrumental introduction to the opera’s Act III, which merges into poignant love music between the teenage heroine Laurie and the drifter Martin.

The Party Scene takes place the night before Laurie’s graduation. Copland’s music has a lively hoedown atmosphere, complete with country fiddling and foot-stamping rhythms. Martin and Laurie have agreed to run away together the next day. Later that night, he realizes that their love is doomed because he represents freedom to her, while she symbolizes settling down for him. He slips away from the farm before dawn.

The Promise of Living derives from Zion’s Walls, a revivalist song. In the opera, it provides material for a vocal quintet in which Laurie’s mother, Ma Moss, looks to the future. She hopes that her daughter, jilted and heartbroken, will carry on the family tradition. Copland’s orchestration is an ingenious combination of two melodies. We hear the themes first independently, then woven together. The music is wondrous: reverent, spiritual and uplifting. In this lyrical orchestral suite, you will sense the patriotic pride so evident in Copland’s finest music.

Valerie Coleman’s Seven O’Clock Shout

Virtual World Premiere June 6, 2020; Philadelphia Orchestra
6 Minutes

Valerie Coleman is equally well known as performing flutist and composer.
She did not start formal study of an instrument until age 11.
Performance Today named her “Classical Woman of the Year” in 2020.
She is on the faculty of the Yale School of Music.

Imani Winds flutist and founder Valerie Coleman is a Louisville native. Today, Coleman is equally well known as a composer, particularly for wind instruments. She moves comfortably between the worlds of jazz, classical music and the vernacular.

The Philadelphia Orchestra commissioned Coleman to write Seven O’Clock Shout in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the world had substantially shut down and artists were seeking ways to communicate with their audiences. Coleman has written:

Seven O’Clock Shout is an anthem inspired by the tireless front-line workers during the COVID-19 pandemic and the heartwarming ritual of evening serenades that brought people together amidst isolation to celebrate life and the sacrifices of heroes. The work begins with a distant and solitary solo between two trumpets in fanfare fashion to commemorate the isolation forced upon humankind, and the need to reach out to one another. The fanfare blossoms into a lushly dense landscape of nature, symbolizing both the caregiving acts of nurses and doctors as they try to save lives and nature transforming and healing herself during a time of human self-isolation. Seven O’Clock Shout ends in a proud anthem in which we all come together with grateful hearts to acknowledge that we have survived yet another day.

Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95, “From the New World”

World Premiere December 16, 1893; New York, New York
40 Minutes

The “New World Symphony” was the culmination of Antonín Dvořák’s years in the U.S., when he was Director of New York’s National Conservatory of Music. Bohemian dance blends with spirituals and Native American music in its themes, thereby combining the New World with the Old. Its slow movement English horn solo, popularly known as “Going Home,” has become one of the best-known melodies in all of classical music.

In fact, Dvořák never intended to directly appropriate Native American folk song. In 1900, he wrote to his former student Oscar Nedbal declaring of the “New World Symphony,” “I have only composed in the spirit of such American national melodies.” Since his first visit to the United States, Dvořák had been intensely curious about the music of the Native American tribes. Late in 1892, through a scholarship student at the American Conservatory, Dvořák became acquainted with African American spirituals as well.

Structurally, the first movement is the strongest. Its rhythmic profile manifests itself in one form or another in all of the succeeding movements. Dvořák wrote a true scherzo for this symphony rather than the Czech furiant he favored in so many other large instrumental works. And in his finale, he incorporates quotations from each of the preceding movements to cyclically unify the symphony.

The Tender Land Suite

Aaron Copland

Born November 14, 1900, in Brooklyn, New York · Died December 2, 1990, in Tarrytown, New York

Aaron Copland’s most beloved music is associated with the ballet stage: Appalachian Spring, Rodeo and Billy the Kid. Less well known are many of his other compositions. For example, Copland made a substantial contribution to film scores, during an era when Hollywood was coming of age. He also wrote operas, whose music is filled with the “Mom and apple pie” spirit of Americana that we love best in his works.

The legendary Broadway partners Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II commissioned Copland to write his second opera, The Tender Land, in 1953, in honor of the League of American Composers’ 30th anniversary. The premiere took place at New York’s City Center Theatre in April 1954. Using a libretto based on James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the opera focused on the farming culture of the American Midwest: a perfect backdrop for Copland’s attractive, folksy style. Although critics had a mixed reaction to the opera, they praised the music. Copland was savvy enough to extract a symphonic suite for the orchestral performance in 1958.

Instrumentation: The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, oboe, English horn, two clarinets (second doubling bass clarinet), two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, glockenspiel, triangle, snare drum, wood block, xylophone, cymbals, ratchet, bass drum, whip, harp, piano/celesta and strings.

Seven O’Clock Shout

Valerie Coleman

Born September 3, 1970, in Louisville, Kentucky

Imani Winds flutist and founder Valerie Coleman is a Louisville native who came late to the field of music. She caught up quickly and has never slowed. Although she did not begin her instrumental studies until age 11, she took to music immediately. By age 14, she had won several performance competitions at the local and state levels. She had also composed three symphonies. Today, Coleman is equally well known as a composer, particularly for wind instruments. She moves comfortably between the worlds of jazz, classical music and the vernacular.

Seven O’Clock Shout is an anthem inspired by the tireless front-line workers during the COVID-19 pandemic and the heartwarming ritual of evening serenades that brought people together amidst isolation to celebrate life and the sacrifices of heroes. The work begins with a distant and solitary solo between two trumpets in fanfare fashion to commemorate the isolation forced upon humankind, and the need to reach out to one another. The fanfare blossoms into a lushly dense landscape of nature, symbolizing both the caregiving acts of nurses and doctors as they try to save lives and nature transforming and healing herself during a time of human self-isolation. Seven O’Clock Shout ends in a proud anthem in which we all come together with grateful hearts to acknowledge that we have survived yet another day.

Coleman’s tuneful score moves from wistful to affirming: a proud celebration of national spirit that is an apt complement to the Copland that opens this program.

Instrumentation: The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, oboe, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, trombone, tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, marimba, vibraphone, claves, cowbell, whistle, harp and strings.

Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95, “From the New World”

Antonín Dvořák

Born September 8, 1841, in Mühlhausen, Bohemia · Died May 1, 1904, in Prague, Czechoslovakia

Misunderstood masterpiece

“In spite of the fact that I have moved about in the great world of music, I shall remain what I have always been – a simple Czech musician.”

These words of Dvořák are uncannily apt when considering the familiar, beloved and misunderstood “New World” Symphony. Sketched and written between December 1892 and May 1893 when Dvořák had come to New York to head the new American Conservatory, the piece was ridiculed at its premiere because of its alleged incorporation of Native American tunes. The critics did acknowledge the symphony’s individuality and its unique amalgam of Czech and American elements. In fact, Dvořák never intended to directly appropriate Native American folk song. Some years later, in 1900, he wrote to his former student Oscar Nedbal declaring of the “New World” Symphony: “I have only composed in the spirit of such American national melodies.”

Connections to Indigenous American music

Since his first visit to the United States, Dvořák had been intensely curious about the music of Native American tribes. Late in 1892, through a scholarship student at the American Conservatory, Dvořák became acquainted with African American spirituals as well. The young man, Henry Thacker Burleigh, played timpani and double bass in the Conservatory orchestra and eventually became the orchestra’s librarian and Dvořák’s copyist. Their interaction bore rich fruit. Innumerable critics have commented on the strong echoes of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” in the first movement of the “New World” Symphony and of “Deep River” later in the work. In fact, as Dvořák’s biographer Gervase Hughes has pointed out:

Folk-tunes often tended (one could put it no higher than that) to be based on a pentatonic scale – C, D, E, G, A (or the equivalent) – indigenous to Bohemia, Somerset, the Hebrides, Ireland and the Appalachians; furthermore the old ‘plantation songs’ of the ‘deep south’ of North America sometimes held rhythmic inflexions similar to those of Slav folk music. Dvořák had the pleasant sagacity to capitalize on these coincidences.

The result is a symphony with extraordinary and spontaneous emotional appeal. If the “New World” has its formal lapses, it amply compensates for them with rhythmic punch and a wealth of memorable, singable melodies that have made this symphony his most popular work.

The most famous movement is, of course, the delicious Largo, which opens with a startling series of coloristic modulations from distant keys: E-major to D-flat major. The immortal “Going Home” melody is said to have been inspired by Dvořák’s consideration of Longfellow’s Hiawatha as a potential opera subject. He was drawn to the legend; nothing came of that project, but his mind was clearly churning with ideas stimulated by his exposure to African American and Native American musical cultures. His English horn solo has become one of the best-known melodies in all of classical music.

Structurally, the first movement is the strongest; its rhythmic profile manifests itself in one form or another in all of the succeeding movements. Dvořák wrote a true scherzo for this symphony rather than the Czech furiant he favored in so many other large instrumental works. And in his finale, he incorporates quotations from each of the preceding movements to cyclically unify the symphony.

Instrumentation: The score calls for woodwinds in pairs, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani and strings.