Music: Dvorak’s “New World Symphony” (Symphony No. 9)

This is my first attempt to review a piece of Western Classical music, so I am understandably nervous. Unlike rock music, where I consider my knowledge to be second to none, Western Classical music is a different matter altogether – especially when I have a family member whose knowledge and expertise far surpasses my own. I am talking about my father here. I better get this right, because if I don’t, he will never let me live it down. And don’t worry, gentle reader, I will not bore you with stories of the intricate details of E-flats and B-major notes, since that is beyond me. I will also not bore you with details of what different movements in a composition mean – these I understand, but they are not relevant to our point of discussion here. What, you ask, is the point of our discussion here? The point of discussion here is how Western Classical music has the unexpected power to move the listener in unforeseen ways. How it has the power to catch you off-guard, and rake up emotions and feelings you thought were long extinct. Allow me to explain.

The older I get, the more I am drawn to Western Classical music. Rock music (good rock music anyway) still appeals to the rebellious teenager in me. Give me a freeway in the Rocky Mountains (the Mumbai-Pune expressway will do just fine too), some great tunes, a cool, sunny day, and (hopefully) a beautiful woman by my side, and you could not ask for a happier camper than Yours Truly. But the older I get, the more my own mortality gets in the way – I know for a fact that I am not immortal, something I did not realize till about ten years ago. Someday at a time and place of his choosing, the Grim Reaper will walk up to me, tap me on the shoulder and say, “Let’s dance”. In the springtime, a middle-aged man’s thoughts turn to his own mortality and the nature of the legacy (if any) that he will leave behind.

So the older I get, my thoughts turn to more “spiritual” things, if that is the right word to use, without getting pretentious about it. And Western Classical music has that peculiar ability to move the listener in ways that sometimes cannot be anticipated. Some classical music pieces such as the one I am writing about have the ability to move people to tears, unexpectedly. And I am not an overtly emotional man. These are not tears of sadness, they are tears of contemplation, tears shed because someone (in this case the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak) has the ability to capture and interpret the human experience so beautifully through music. Without saying a word, using only the medium of music, he can suddenly capture what I am thinking and feeling at a particular moment. Truly amazing.

I have been listening to Western Classical music ever since I can remember. When I was very young, my father had those precious LPs that are still part of the family collection. I would not sell them for all the money in the world. They are part of my heritage and a family heirloom. I can remember listening to Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto at the age of four, and being mesmerized by the wonder and beauty of it all. It is a defining memory. I will write about the feelings that particular piece inspires in me in another blog.

So now that I have introduced you to this particular blog in my own inimitable, roundabout fashion, it is time to get to the point. Antonin Dvorak (pronounced “Vorjak”) was a Czech composer who was born in 1841. I will spare you the details of his life, since they are not particularly relevant and may bore you, gentle reader. Suffice to say that he was already moderately famous before he went to America in 1892 at the age of 51. America of course, is the new world in the “New World Symphony”. He had already composed the famous classical piece “Slavonic Dances”. In America, he landed in that great melting pot of cultures, New York City and took up a job as a teacher of composition and artistic director at the recently established New York National Conservatory of Music. He spent three years in America, and it changed him in ways he never expected. Coming from the comparatively cloistered, insulated Old World city of Prague, New York City in all its cosmopolitan glory must have taken him by surprise.

In New York, he must have met people from different social, economic, racial and ethnic backgrounds. He was exposed to American blues music, what in those days, they called “Negro spirituals”, songs such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”. He also heard for the first time, the other-worldly yet hypnotic Native American chants. From this bewildering mosaic of musical styles, Dvorak fashioned the epic New World Symphony. The music captured the optimism of a young country, where the opportunities seemed limitless and where the constraints of Old World Europe did not apply. America was all about optimism and the freedom of the open road, where everything seemed possible if only one tried hard enough. The stifling conventions of Old Europe did not exist here. The New World Symphony reflects that.

But there is an underlying element of sadness here. We do not know Antonin Dvorak’s position on slavery or racial segregation. Although slavery had been abolished almost thirty years earlier at the end of the American Civil War in 1865, racial segregation was still strictly enforced, and the treatment of African-Americans and persons of other non-white races was still appalling. Dvorak must have had an opportunity to listen to those beautiful “Negro spirituals” with their yearnings for a just and better world in the after-life. He also must have had the opportunity to listen to the chants of the Native American tribes, whose last desperate attempts to save their own cultural heritage and civilization took place in the 1890s. Indeed, part of the symphony reflects Dvorak’s attempts to put American poet Longfellow’s epic poem “Hiawatha” to music. These songs and chants must have moved him immensely, because he incorporated them into his new composition.

What Dvorak paints then is a picture of America as a flawed paradise – a Garden of Eden, a land of plenty where the image of perfection is only skin-deep, and where tragedy and suffering lurk below the seemingly perfect surface. It is a compelling portrait that is happy and sad, realistic yet dreamy and yearning, optimistic yet somber, all at the same time. It is a masterpiece. America left a deep imprint on Dvorak. Listening to the New Word Symphony brings out these conflicting emotions and feelings in the discerning classical music aficionado.

Listening to the New World Symphony also reminds me of America – a country I love next ony to my own – India. The country is still young, it is still optimistic because it is not burdened by thousands of years of history. Everything is still new, and everything can still be looked at from a fresh perspective. It seems possible to make a fresh start to life, no matter how old one is. And there still is the promise of eternal youth and glory when you drive down the freeway in the Colorado Rockies on a sunny, summer day in an open-top convertible, with Dvorak’s New World Symphony blaring from the speakers on your car stereo.