In Search of an American Music
Antonín Dvořák spent three critical years in America residing in New York City, (with summers in a rural Czech enclave in Iowa), and attending the 1893 Chicago World’s Exposition that is often credited with nurturing the spread of ragtime music. He arrived in 1892 on the invitation of Jeanette Thurber, on a commission to head the newly established National Conservatory of Music. The institution was devoted to the inclusion of African Americans, and even women, in formal musical training. There he was introduced to Negro Spirituals by his assistant, Harry Burleigh who went on to arrange many of those spirituals in classical form.
Dvořák became preoccupied with a conviction that the uniquely American music that everyone was searching for would originate from the country's unique demographics. He experimented with musical ideas he associated with Native Americans, and was influenced by African American spirituals and syncopation. His most famous quote on this subject, from an editorial in the New York Herald, is often said to predict the development of jazz twenty years later:
"In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music. They are pathétic, tender, passionate, melancholy, solemn, religious, bold, merry, gay or what you will. It is music that suits itself to any mood or purpose. The
