Longy’s performance are free and open to the public, but please register in advance.
The Horszowski Trio presents Czech composer Antonín Dvořák’s music in Railway to the New World and a New Time, reflecting on his life after arriving in America and his great epic, Trio in f minor.
Dvořák championed American music, particularly music by Black Americans. As director of the National Conservatory of Music of America in New York City, he inspired and supported his Black American students.
After Dvořák’s New World Symphony was played in Carnegie Hall in 1893, one of his students, William Arms Fisher, wrote a text to the chorale tune in the second movement entitled Goin’ Home. It became so successful that it was mistaken for a Black American spiritual. Another student of Dvořák’s, Will Marion Cook, taught the beloved pianist and composer Duke Ellington. Many years later, student Kenji Bunch wrote a solo violin piece that quoted one of Ellington’s famous songs, “Take the “A” Train.”