COURSE OVERVIEW
The Institute will take place July 12 to 30, Monday though Friday, 9am to 4:30pm, on the University of Pittsburgh campus.
The three weeks will include three field trips as well as recitals by pianist Steven Mayer. For a detailed description, please see the Letter from the Director and the Daily Schedule.
Week One
In Week One, Institute Director Joe Horowitz will offer an overview of Dvořák’s American sojourn. Special attention will be devoted to a “Tale of Two Cities” – how Dvorak was embraced by Manhattan, then as now a city of immigrants, but was denounced in Boston as a “negrophile.” With Yale University art historian Tim Barringer, Horowitz will also explore how such iconic American painters as Frederic Church and George Catlin explored the same elegiac and majestic landscapes that Dvorak articulated in music. The topics at hand here include immigration, Social Darwinism, and Manifest Destiny.
Robert Winter of UCLA will acquaint participants with the massive collection of primary sources materials that he has compiled in DVD format. He will use his interactive Dvorak DVD to explore such topics as the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago’s galvanizing “White City” of 1893) and Buffalo Bill’s “Wild West.”
The week will conclude with a lecture/recital by the phenomenal piano virtuoso Steven Mayer, exploring the “Black Virtuoso Tradition” shared by Dvorak with the likes of Scott Joplin, James P. Johnson, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, and Art Tatum. Mayer’s contribution will focus larger questions overhanging the entire Institute: What makes music sound ‘American? What can culture—music, painting, literature—tell us about how we define and understand the American experience?
Week Two
Week Two will begin with what was once the best-known, most-read work of American literature: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. Michael Beckerman will share his landmark research on how this text influenced Dvorak’s New World Symphony. What are we to make of Longfellow’s romanticization of the “noble savage” – of its influence a century ago, of its meanings today? What was the actual fate of Native Americans in Dvorak’s America?
Beckerman will also reveal how the “Yellow Journalist” James Creelman acted as Dvorak’s behind-the-scenes American advocate. As a sleuthing music historian, he has ascertained that Creelman was the actual writer of Dvorak’s most influential, most controversial words: “I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called the Negro melodies.” Yellow Journalism was once a distinctive feature of American media culture – and famously contributed to the Spanish-American War.
Dale Cockrell of Vanderbilt University, a leading authority on Stephen Foster and blackface minstrelsy, will explore what was once the most popular form of American entertainment. Dvořák adored the minstrel songs of Foster and attended blackface shows at which white performers caricatured indolent blacks. And yet Dvořák and Foster cannot be dismissed as racists. Kevin Deas, one of today’s most eminent African-American concert singers, will contribute to our discussion of minstrel and plantation songs. (To read more about how the Institute will handle this controversial but essential topic, see the Letter from the Director.)
Jean Snyder, the biographer of Dvorak's African-American assistant Harry Burleigh, will conduct a field trip to Erie, Pennsylvania. Burleigh acquired plantation song from his blind grandfather, a former slave. Young Harry was celebrated in Erie for his splendid baritone; the community took up a collection to send him to New York to study. His close relationship with Dvorak was mutually inspirational. Fired by Dvorak, Burleigh was the first to transcribe and perform spirituals as recital songs. Our all-day Harry Burleigh field trip is an institute-within-an-institute including historic sites, a Harry Burleigh show, and a choral concert.
The week concludes with a visit to the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for American Music, led by its Project Coordinator, Mariana Whitmer. She will introduce “Voices Across Time,” the Center’s program for incorporating American popular song into the teaching of American history. The Center houses the original manuscript of Dvořák’s arrangement of Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home.”
The focus of week three will be the development and presentation of curricular units drawn from the subject matter of the Institute, an exercise guided by Horowitz, Snyder, and Whitmer, and by the institute’s “master teacher”—Harry Dawe, from New York City’s Fieldston School. The finished projects will be posted on the Pittsburgh Symphony’s Dvořák Institute website.
