The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #13099 Message #2004270
Posted By: Q (Frank Staplin)
22-Mar-07 - 03:09 PM
Thread Name: Lyr/Chords Req: Going Home (Dvorak)
Subject: RE: Lyrics/chords to Dvorak Going Home
Good arangement!
Dr. Dvorak came to New York in 1892 as Director of the National Conservatory of Music, returning to Bohemia in 1895. Quoted in Harper's Magazine, Feb. 1895: Since all people have their own distinctive songs, he asks: "What songs, then, belong to the American? What melody would stop him on the street if he were in a strange land and make the home-feeling well up within him? The most potent, as well as the most beautiful among them, according to my estimation, are certain of the so-called plantation melodies and slave songs."
William Arms Fisher, one of his students, wrote (1925) in the introduction to his "Seventy Negro Spirituals (edited for low voice)," "Of course Dr. Dvorak's suggestion that in the songs of the Negro might be found material for use in artistic forms brought derision upon him from some Americans." ...
There was much comment about him and his statements, much of it untrue. Mr. Fisher says he found Dvorak one morning walking up and down his studio shaking a New York morning paper like a rag and exclaiming with heat: "See what they make me say! I did not say it. I will go back to my Bohemia." His friends in Austria (including the Viennese critic Hanslick) and Bohemia had already recognized a "fresh thematic element, a new trait and idiom denied by some American critics" (Arms, p. xiii).