Criterios morfológicos:

It is not only Bohemian folk music that may have influenced Dvořák’s Biblical

Songs. During his three years in America, Dvořák became friends with Harry T.

Burleigh, a young African American singer and composer who was studying at the National Conservatory on a scholarship. On hearing Burleigh sing, Dvořák apparently invited the young man into his home, and asked him to perform the plantation songs that he had learned from his relatives.62 Burleigh later wrote that while in America, Dvořák ‘literally saturated himself with Negro song…I sang our Negro songs for him very often, and before he wrote his own themes, he filled himself with the spirit of the old Spirituals.’63 _{In New Worlds of}

Dvořák, Beckerman proposes that these ‘spirituals’, which ‘went far beyond

biblical description into an exalted world of religious spirit’, may have been the original ‘biblical songs’ for Dvořák.64 Such statements raise questions about the extent to which Dvořák was influenced by the music he heard in America –

61 _{Dvořák to Simrock, quoted in Klaus Döge, ‘Dvořák, Antonín’, in The New Grove Dictionary}

of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie and J. Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), vol.7, p.781.

62

Jean E. Snyder, ‘A Great and Noble School of Music: Dvořák, Harry T. Burleigh, and the African American Spiritual’, in Dvořák in America:1892-1895, ed. John C. Tibbetts (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1993), p.130.

63 _{From Harry T. Burleigh, ‘The Negro and His Song’, in Music on the Air, ed. Hazel Gertrude}

Kinscella (New York: The Viking Press, 1934), p.188, quoted in Ibid., p.131.

64 _{Beckerman, New Worlds of Dvořák: Searching in America for the Composer's Inner Life,}

questions which have been debated ever since the composition of the ‘New World’ symphony.

During his stay in America, much of the media attention that Dvořák received was directed at the idea of nationalism in music. Indeed, as we saw earlier, one of the key reasons he was brought to America was because of his reputation as a ‘cultural nationalist’ (see p.49). One journalist wrote the following on the eve of the first performance of the ‘New World’ Symphony: ‘He [Dvořák] has made a serious study of the national music of this continent as exemplified in the native melodies of the negro and Indian races. What the effect of this study has been the New York public will have the opportunity of hearing this afternoon.’65 Thus followed lengthy quotes from Dvořák about the spirit of ‘Negro’ and ‘Indian’ music, which he had apparently attempted to recreate in his symphony. The idea that Dvořák made a ‘serious’ study of the music he heard in America has since come under attack from scholars.66 However, subsequent discussions of Dvořák’s American compositions have often focussed to a large extent on exactly what constitutes this ‘spirit.’ Beckerman offers a rather facetious summary of this research, while hinting at the difficulties inherent in trying to locate a particular national style in music:

No one has yet been able to articulate what, precisely, is American about Dvořák’s works…The discussion usually begins with allusions to pentatonicism, which, it is grudgingly acknowledged, could well have evolved in Bohemia, and continues with mysterious and inscrutable Indians, Scotch snaps,

65 _{From an article in the New York Herald, 15 December 1893, reproduced in Tibbetts, ed.,}

Dvořák in America: 1892–1895, p.362.

66 _{See for example, John Clapham, ‘Dvořák and the American Indian’, in Dvořák in America:}

and references to Black singers who may or may not sound like cors anglais.67

The Biblical Songs were written by a Czech composer working in America, apparently under the influence of African American and American Indian music. However, as David Beveridge hints, certain ‘American’ characteristics that have been described in the compositions that Dvořák wrote while in America are not unlike various ‘Bohemian’ characteristics that have been identified in his other music.68 Furthermore, Richard Taruskin points out that the music of a number of nations makes use of pentatonicism.69

In Dahlhaus’s opinion, ‘regardless of the milieu being depicted, exoticism and folklorism almost invariably make do with the same technical devices.’70 Dvořák’s own comments about American music in the New York Herald only serve to enhance this point: ‘I found that the music of the two races [African American and American Indian] bore a remarkable similarity to the music of Scotland. In both there is a peculiar scale, caused by the absence of the fourth and seventh, or leading tone.’71 Dvořák is, of course, referring to the pentatonic scale here.

67 _{Michael Beckerman, ‘Dvořák's Pentatonic Landscape: The Suite in A Major’, in Rethinking}

Dvořák: Views from Five Countries, ed. David R. Beveridge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p.250.

68 _{David Beveridge, ‘Sophisticated Primitivism: The Significance of Pentatonicism in Dvořák's}

American Quartet’, Current Musicology 23 (1977), pp.25-36.

69 _{Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music: Volume 3 - the Nineteenth Century}

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p.765.

70 _{Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, p.306.}

71 _{From an article in the New York Herald, 15 December 1893, reproduced in Tibbetts, ed.,}

Another term that has been used to describe Dvořák’s American works is ‘pastoral.’72 _{Beckerman locates Dvořák’s ‘Americanness’ not so much in}

potential evocations of African American and American Indian music, but rather in the new landscape that the composer encountered in America:

There must be something that animated this language, that caused a series of tendencies, already present in Dvořák’s work in Bohemia, to become magnified. I would like to focus on one factor that is still with us and that is something Dvořák noticed: the landscape.73

Beckerman’s particular focus in this article is Dvořák’s Suite in A major. In fact, Dvořák interrupted his composition of this work in order to write the Biblical

Songs, which might suggest that he made use of similar ‘pastoral’ characteristics

in the songs. As we shall see, we can certainly locate moments of tonal and motivic stasis in the songs, which relate to those characteristics observed by Beckerman in the Suite in A major.74 _{However, this phenomenon of what}

Dahlhaus refers to as ‘musical landscape painting’ is closely linked to the techniques used to represent exoticism and folklorism.75 Thus, we cannot ascertain whether Dvořák was representing specific American or Czech music in his Biblical Songs, nor if he was trying to represent the idea of landscape. Thus, it is not my objective to attempt to distinguish between the influence of the African American spiritual, American Indian music, Bohemian folksong, and depictions of the pastoral in the Biblical Songs. The important issue, as

72 _{See for example, Beckerman, ‘Dvořák's Pentatonic Landscape: The Suite in A Major’,}

pp.250-51.

73 _{Ibid., p.251.} 74 _{Ibid., pp.249-50.}

Dahlhaus states, is the extent to which compositional devices differ from the ‘European norm.’76 _{Of course, what Dahlhaus refers to as a ‘European norm’ is}

really an ‘Austro-German norm.’ The various characteristics used by Dvořák – be they pentatonicism, tonal and motivic stasis, pedal points and the like – define a style which contravenes the German tonal idiom. As we shall see in the following chapters, and understanding of Dvořák’s use of such devices is crucial to unlocking the meaning of the Biblical Songs.

76 _Ibid.

Part Two: