Many composers of Euro-American art music have attempted to “incorporate” elements of Indigenous musics into their works. What words like “incorporate,” “influence” and “inspire'' in these contexts fail to address, however, is that these composers were taking elements of Indigenous songs completely out of context and forcing them into the constraints of Western music theory. The main surge in these efforts, now called the Indianist movement, was one of many forms of colonial extractivism taking place in the late 19th century. Much of the Indianist movement stemmed from a pressure for composers to create a sound that was distinctively “American,” just as European composers had begun to attempt to evoke the sounds of their respective countries. Such an interest in American musical nationalism was largely brought into momentum by the well-known Bohemian composer Antonín Dvořák, who discouraged American composers from following the style of European works. While visiting the U.S. for about three years, Dvořák sought to find suggestions for possible “inspirations” of a uniquely American sound, looking to some of the most marginalized communities in the country for that material.

Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, premiered in December 1893 and commonly known as the New World Symphony, is one of the most famous compositions known to have been “inspired” by both Indigenous and Black musics. While this reputation is widely circulated today, one might be surprised to learn that Dvořák appears to have fabricated the notion that he had any knowledge of the characteristics of Indigenous musics during his composition process. Upon the completion of the symphony in May of 1893, Dvořák interviewed with the New York Herald, claiming to only have sourced his “inspiration” from Black spirituals. It wasn’t until seven months later in another Herald interview, published a day before the symphony’s premiere, that Dvořák mentioned drawing from Indigenous “influences” (Pisani, 2005: 186).

In this interview, Dvořák elaborated that he had never actually sourced Indigenous music itself as inspiration, only the “color” or “spirit” that is evoked at the thought of their cultures, as well as studying what some scholars were calling the “peculiarities'' of Indigenous musics. In an attempt to embody the “Indian spirit”, Dvořák drew inspiration from The Song of Hiawatha, a poem featuring Indigenous characters by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Pisani, 2005: 146). As for the “peculiarities” of Indigenous musics, Dvořák was likely referring to a report by music theorist John Comfort Fillmore that used such a phrasing. The report, published in August of 1893, detailed the “structural peculiarities” of the songs studied by Alice C. Fletcher with Francis La Flesche in A Study of Omaha Music. In fact, Fillmore sent a copy of the report to Dvořák during his stay at the August 1893 Chicago World’s Fair in hopes that he would consider Indigenous musics as a source for the new “American” sound (Deloria, 2004:195; Pisani, 2005: 187). Up until this point, there is no evidence that Dvořák claimed any direct inspiration for the New World Symphony from Indigenous musics (Pisani, 2005: 188). It appears Dvořák decided to tack on Indigenous “influence” as an afterthought, likely for the sake of publicity and strengthening his case for a national “American” sound.

Since Dvořák appears to have never actually studied Indigenous musics prior to completing his symphony, the suggestion that Indigenous musics served as any “inspiration” while composing the work appears to be very misleading. At the time, however, Dvořák was likely able to justify this deception due to the widespread confusion among European Americans about the differences between Black and Indigneous musics. His second interview with the Herald put particular emphasis on the “similarities” between Black and Indigenous musics, identifying a perceived commonality in the pitch content of the two musical practices. Within Euro-American understandings of music theory, this commonality is categorized as a pentatonic scale, which was notoriously labeled as “primitive” at the time. This conflation of Black and Indigenous musics allowed the two practices to be viewed as a vaguely “Indigenous” sound, which worked in Dvořák’s favor in his efforts to create a moe uniquely “American” musical identity, while erasing the distinct cultural practices of the two marginalized groups. This carelessness, along with Dvořák's treatment of Indigenous musics as an afterthought, has led to the inaccurate, decontextualized, and vague evocations of Black and Indigenous musics in the New World Symphony that are still romanticized and revered today.

Works Cited:

• Deloria, Philip J. 2004. “The Hills are Alive…with the Sound of Indian” in Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas. 183-223.
• Fillmore, John C. 1893. “Report on the Structural Peculiarities of the Music” in A Study of Omaha Indian Music by Alice C. Fletcher and Francis La Flesche. Archaeological and Ethnological Papers of the Peabody Museum, 1 (5). Cambridge, Mass. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. 59-77.
• Pisani, Michael V. 2005. Imagining Native America in Music. New Haven, Con. Yale University Press.