The New World – Symphonies

The premiere of Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, Op. 95 From the New World is one of the landmark moments in classical music history. 

The piece debuted on December 16, 1893 at Carnegie Hall with Anton Seidl conducting the New York Philharmonic Society. Critics at the time lauded the work’s blend of symphonic tradition and American influences. Some, like Leonard Bernstein, felt it was more a European symphony linked only tangentially to American ideas. 

Dvořák set off to compose a work that he felt represented the sound world of the place he had found himself living in, America, with its mix of cultures both native and imported. He worked specifically to incorporate African and Native Indian music culture with his own Czech sensibilities informed by European symphonic influences.

Some critics at the time dismissed these ‘new’ influences as “primitive” and incapable rising to the level of serious art, or of rivaling the great European traditions. A chauvinist, if not outright racist mindset.

Yet, history has proven the piece to have been extremely important in the exploration and championing of an American aesthetic in symphonic music, with composers like William Grant Still, George Gershwin, and Aaron Copland drawing influence from Dvořák’s work.

The conversation opened by this work is a pertinent one in Trinidad and Tobago in the latter days of 2024. The broad question: can the elements of Trinidadian and Tobagonian folk, calypso, and other musical forms and styles rise to the level of high art to rival the ancient and now established music traditions of Europe and America? Do the processes for development of thematic material in Panorama music fit into the symphony as a genre?

For me, the only possible answer has to be, yes! Of course, yes!

Panorama music, the genre formed as a derivative work for steel pan orchestra based on a preexisting calypso song, is – despite its seeming folk roots, its ‘knife fight’ history – a bona fide genre of formal composition. It’s classical music.

In this genre we see the work of some 6-odd decades establishing a music that is predictable and consistent, with generic expectations and outcomes regarding structure, and regarding the processes and devices of composition. We have a defined and consistent set of performance-practice, rhetoric, and audience expectations. The fact that the music begins and ends in the realm of the folk, the people, makes this music unique, as genres of formal composition go. 

For people who like me who are interested of exploring new avenues for the development of ‘local’ music, the music of Panorama is our obvious ‘big brother’ genre, the music we imitate in order to innovate. 

One surprising aspect of this exploration, I’ve observed (a weird push-back) is the fulmination of that same mindset faced by Dvořák and others, that this music does not rise to the level of high art and has no place in the ‘concert hall.’ 

“That’s for the pan yard, not for Carnegie Hall.”

This is an important conversation, even here in Trinidad and Tobago, even now at the close of 2024. Specially important, because this conversation cuts to the heart, not just of who we are in this place, but of who we think we are, of who we know ourselves to be. Not of what ‘they’ think of us, but of what we can see and catalogue and study about ourselves, in the music we practice. 

An important conversation raised 131 years ago and still pertinent today. As good a reason as ever to listen to Dvořák’s Symphony #9, From the New World, and to consider what the future might bring.