Tune Req: Going Home (Dvorak)

Subject: RE: Tune Req: Going Home
From: Bonnie Shaljean
Date: 04 Mar 09 - 02:31 PM

I answered this question already when you asked it last week in the "UK Hovis Ad 1970s" thread on the 26th February, including identifying it as "Going Home" with a YouTube clip, and emailed that same Hotmail address with a notification.

http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=63403

Are there other lyrics than those?

Subject: RE: Tune Req: Going Home
From: wilbyhillbilly
Date: 04 Mar 09 - 04:59 AM

Sherrie, I've just emailed you an mp3 version of Annie Haslam with Male Voice Choir which in my opinion is one of the best.

whb

Subject: RE: Tune Req: Going Home
From: GUEST
Date: 03 Mar 09 - 12:11 PM

Hi there, We desperately need some help, our nan is dieing, her favourite song was 'going home', the hovis ad, now, my mum says there are lyrics to this song, and that is was sung by a few people, we, as my nan loved it, would like to play it as her funeral song, somebody please help and just send me the lyrics and somekind of download, as time is not on our side!!! I so hope someone out there can help us...!!! Thank u, from Sherrie.... please send me e-mail to:- [e-mail]

---

Lyrics in threads listed in the crosslinks above. Lyrics sent by e-mail.
-Joe Offer-

Subject: RE: Tune Req: 'Going Home' Recording
From: wysiwyg
Date: 03 Sep 01 - 03:20 PM

Sorry guys--

I started the bad-- didn't do a Mudcat search before answering.

CLICK HERE for one of several good past threads. This one has links to a MIDI where the tune is played and more past threads!

Let's all read up before carrying the debate any further. Farther. Whatever.

~Susan

Subject: RE: Tune Req: 'Going Home' Recording
From: Dicho (Frank Staplin)
Date: 03 Sep 01 - 02:53 PM

Guest, no one has answered your query. Sorry.

Subject: RE: Tune Req: 'Going Home' Recording
From: Dicho (Frank Staplin)
Date: 03 Sep 01 - 02:51 PM

No one seems to have quoted Dvorak himself. "I do not intend to adopt melodies and treat them as themes. But I study certain melodies until I have assimilated their characteristic features and can create musical figures from them which preserve their characteristic features while taking them further...In this sense I was concerned to write the new symphony. I did not really use any of the Negro and Indian melodies. I simply wrote original themes of my own and developed them, whereby I exploited all the possibilities of modern rhythm, harmonics, contrapuntal technique and orchestral colour." A New York critic, after the first performance, stated that Dvorak had declared an allegiance to American music. Dvorak responded " The motifs are my own, and some I brought with me. That is and remains Czech music." Uwe Kramer wrote "It was only possible to confound American, Czech and "Indian" elements because at that time no-one would see that the pentatonic scales (in the English horn melody of the largo) and the syncopation in the first and third themes of the first movement are just as characteristic of Bohemian folk music as of Negro spirituals" (Comments reproduced in the Sony booklet accompanying the Eugene Ormandy interpretation).

Subject: RE: Tune Req: 'Going Home' Recording
From: Dicho (Frank Staplin)
Date: 03 Sep 01 - 02:28 PM

There is no evidence that a folk tune "Goin' Home preceeded Dvorak's composition. See previous threads.

Subject: RE: Tune Req: 'Going Home' Recording
From: masato sakurai
Date: 03 Sep 01 - 12:59 PM

IanC,

Was it a folk tune? I'll quote the following passage from John Lovell, Jr., Black Song (p. 444). The summing-up seems persuasive to me:

Dvorak himself said, "Everyone who has a nose must smell America in the symphony." He says he would never have written it had he not seen America. But he adds, "I wrote my own themes, embodying in them the qualities of Negro or Indian music and, using these themes as subject, I developed them with all the resources of modern rhythm, harmonisation, counterpoint, and orchestral coloring."
Tim Dennison, Sr., says that the "Largo" of the symphony was a Negro lulluby, "Mammy's Chile," and that it had been sung by Afro-American mothers to their children long before Dvorak came to America.
William Arms Fisher seems to have summed up the case. First he quotes W.A.F. (himself), a pupil of Dvorak, to the effect that the composer did not incorporate Negro themes but invented his own "after the negro manner." W.A.F. continues, "He was ever seeking fresh musical material and in the Negro spiritual he rejoiced to find something that from the old-world point of view was unhackneyed and moreover indigenous. He saturated himself in it and then simply and naturally gave rich expression to his 'discovery,'" Then, Fisher writes,

The Largo, with its haunting English horn solo, is the outpouring of Dvorak's own home-longing, with something of the loneliness of far-off prairie horizons, the faint memory of the red-man's bygone days, and a sense of tragedy of the black-man as it sings in his "spirituals." Deeper still it is a moving expression of that nostalgia of the soul all human beings feel. That the lyric opening of the Largo should spontaneously suggest the words "Goin' home, goin' home" is natural enough, and that the lines that follow the melody should take the form of a negro spiritual accords with the genious of the symphony.

According to James J. Fuld (The Book of World-Famous Music, 4th ed, p. 558), the words of "Going Home" by William Arms Fisher were published in 1922.

Masato

Subject: RE: Tune Req: 'Going Home' Recording
From: IanC
Date: 03 Sep 01 - 12:37 PM

Susan

You're probably right on that one.

As regards Dv's Symphony No.9, though, it is pretty literally a series of folk tunes tarted up and strung together, as someone once said to me.

;-)
Ian

Subject: RE: Tune Req: 'Going Home' Recording
From: wysiwyg
Date: 03 Sep 01 - 12:33 PM

Ian, I think that one has gone back and forth. Me, I don't care, as long as we are talking about the same one!

My current personal opinion is that all good music will turn out to have been based on spirituals. *G* Kidding.

~S~

Subject: RE: Tune Req: 'Going Home' Recording
From: IanC
Date: 03 Sep 01 - 12:11 PM

Susan

You should know that Dvorak's largo is based on the folk tune "going home" not vice versa.

:-)
Ian

Subject: RE: Tune Req: 'Going Home' Recording
From: Skipjack K8
Date: 03 Sep 01 - 12:07 PM

Would it be the Knopfler tune?

Subject: RE: Tune Req: 'Going Home' Recording
From: wysiwyg
Date: 03 Sep 01 - 11:59 AM

If you mean the folk melody hymn/gospel/spiritual based on the Dvorak melody, I could do it in Noteworthy Composer and make a MIDI of it-- if you don't get anything more "live."

If what you want is something for a funeral, and you can find someone to play it, you could use the Noteworthy version as a printed melody. A keyboard on the right setting, or an organ with the right stops, could do it, and if you want this for graveside you could record that.

So... say more, or e-mail me if you like.

~Susan

[e-mail]

Subject: 'Going Home' Recording
From: GUEST
Date: 03 Sep 01 - 09:53 AM

I need to find a good "traditional" style recording of a straightforward Pipe Band or solo PIper playing "Going Home"