by Jeffrey Bell-Hanson

Despite our long and tortured racial history in the United States, it would be ridiculous not to recognize the blending of African and European elements as bedrock to our musical culture. Nevertheless, I recently read something in an old music magazine from the nineteenth century that brought me up short.

Kunkel’s Musical Review was a monthly publication of Kunkel Brothers Publishers in St. Louis, Missouri from 1878 until 1909. The magazine was a way for the brothers, Charles and Jacob, to promote their music publishing business. Most of the pages of the magazine were, in fact, filled with piano music, but articles about musical personalities and events, both local and national, appeared in the front and back along with ads for piano companies and all manner of other businesses.

Volume 16, Number 7 in July of 1893 featured an article about Antonín Dvořák’s advice to American composers to embrace “negro melodies.” He had been invited by philanthropist, Jeanette Thurber to come to the United States, lead the newly founded National Conservatory, and help American composers find a unique voice, as he had done in his native Bohemia. After hearing the young singer, Henry Burleigh sing spirituals and work songs, he said, “I am now satisfied that the future of this country must be founded upon what are called negro melodies. This must be the foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States.…These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are American.”

The article goes on to quote a number of “prominent” musicians’ responses, which ranged from bemused skepticism to outraged racist bile. Some of the worst of it comes from William T. Mollenhauer, who wrote,

The idea of using negro melodies as a basis for a new school of American composition appears ridiculous. These melodies are so incipient and trivial that an American would be ashamed to derive his inspiration from such trash…”

And it only gets worse. Displaying a much greater degree of equanimity, B. J. Lang wrote in the Boston Herald,

I agree with [Dvořák] that [“negro melodies”] “are pathetic, tender,” etc., etc., and that there are many of them well fitted to supply themes for large and serious works; but when he says that “the American musician understands these tunes, they appeal to his imagination because of their associations,” etc., I am inclined to disagree with him….It does not seem natural for a white man to write a symphony, using real plantation melodies for his subject or theme, and to claim that his work is in consequence something distinctly American. It surely would be American, but its germs are not born of “white folks.” I wish Dr. Dvorak [sic] would write something himself, using themes from these plantation songs. Such an act would set an example for our American composers, which, if followed, might beget for the dark races of our Southern states and its history, what Liszt was for the Hungarian, Chopin for the Pole, and Dvorak himself has been for the Bohemian.

Dvořák’s response was to do just that. In the “American” Quartet, the “New World” Symphony and the Cello Concerto, he created three of the most enduring and beloved works of the classical repertoire to this day.

There is a great irony here: that this (capital B) Bohemian would so quickly recognize the importance of the non-European elements in our culture while so many in our own white musical establishment were so completely blinded to them by their own prejudices. Did having been part of a repressed minority within the Austro-Hungarian Empire give him some sense of solidarity with the far-more repressed black minority in the United States?

Dvořák was right, though the ultimate success of this cultural melding would come much faster than he probably could have predicted, and it would go much farther than incorporating the engaging melodies that Burleigh sang for him into essentially European forms. How much credit he deserves for encouraging African American musicians, whose music would soon circle the globe like wildfire and profoundly change Western culture, is debatable. He deserves credit, however, for doing exactly what Lang dared him to do—not just talking about it, but making it into a musical reality. Perhaps that at least helped to blunt the skeptics and open some ears to the truly revolutionary music that would soon follow from Scott Joplin, James P. Johnson, Burleigh himself, Florence Beatrice Price, William Grant Still and many others.