'Dvorak in America' articles never mention how Gottschalk was hard at work integrating African American folk music several decades earlier. There wasn't much appetite in the U.S. at the time but it was wildly popular in Europe...
One of the best concerts I went to involved an impenetrable and lengthy Avant Garde work by which time it was over I, in spite of my general openness, wanted to leave, but the next piece was a Gottschalk piece with lots of well-known American melodies which was wonderfully comprehensible in comparison. In other circumstances I might have dismissed it but in this particular context it was like water to someone dying of dehydration.
From the article:
"In traveling to America, Dvořák was on a mission to create an “American music,” to find and elevate the country’s folk tradition, even the sound of its daily life. What immediately captured his imagination was African American music, slave songs, and spirituals."
Perhaps they should mention Gottschalk simply to explain that no-one was actually confused about how to elevate the folk tradition in America...
Playing Dvorak's American Quartet was one of the best musical experiences of my life, and I'm grateful to the natural environment around Spillville, if it could enable Dvorak to produce such a work. There's nothing American about the music, by the way; it's just as satisfyingly Bohemian as the rest of Dvorak's music, even if he was self-consciously using a pentatonic scale, and may have tried to sound American. I think he was so perfectly steeped in his own culture and his own sound that anything he wrote came out sounding like him and his place. (And by the way, best viola melody ever.)
Well, he is! His cello concerto is standard repertoire across the world, and his New World Symphony is standard in the US. He should also be known for originating the ET theme [1,2], but that's not how things work.
Fellow Iowan here. I’ve had similar experiences when Tim Dodd (Everyday Astronaut) has been featured. Also one of my old professors’ blog hit the front page once.
ahem... I have been writing with a dvorak keyboard for more than a decade.
The move from qwerty to dvorak took me 4 months of PAIN. You must have a strong will to keep going, because the interference of real life will generate a strong drag to qwerty.
And I got a few ortholinear keyboards with that (next is columnar/ortholinear DYO mechanical keyboard with RISC-V 64 bits firmware... ok ok ok, that's all theory, I may end-up with a staggered qwerty if I am too busy doing something else and I do run out of keyboards).
Le Bananier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nfuv2GzNF-8