The New York Times has called Joseph Horowitz, “a force in classical music today.” Not only is he a scholar of music, he has written eight books, including his young readers book, “Dvorak and America,” chronicling Dvorak’s brief period in America. He also produces concert festivals and once served as Executive Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic. For many years he served as a critic for the New York Times.

When I heard Horowitz is conducting a summer institute through the National Endowment for the Humanities for 25 middle and high school teachers, sponsored by the Pittsburg Symphony and held on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh, I knew it was a place I wanted to be. He calls the institute: “Dvorak in America: In Search of the New World,” and he has enlisted leading scholars and educators from around the country who are experts in American culture to serve as faculty: Robert Winter, UCLA music professor; Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University; Michael Beckerman, Professor of Music at NYU; Dale Cockrell, Professor of Music in the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University; Harry Dawe, esteemed Independent School educator; Steven Mayer, pianist; Jean Snyder, Professor of Music at Edinboro University; and Mariana Whitmer, who teaches in the University of Pittsburgh Music Department. That’s quite a lineup!

Why spend a summer studying Dvorak in America?

Czech composer of the Romantic period, Antonin Leopold Dvorak (1841-1904), lived in America from 1892 to 1895, where he served as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City, at the request of wealthy philanthropist, Jeannette Thurber. His objective was to “discover” American music.

Horowitz puts it this way: “Jeanette Thurber, a visionary educator, had lured Dvorak from Bohemia to direct her National Conservatory of Music. She handed him a mandate: to help New World composers create a concert idiom Americans would recognize as their own. ‘It is to the poor that I turn for musical greatness,’ Dvorak told a New York reporter. ‘The poor work hard; they study seriously.’”

Dvorak was fascinated by Buffalo Bill, the slave trade, the plantation songs, Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha,” blackface minstrels, and the creations of Stephen Foster. He loved the Indian dances, the American folk music, and the songs. He was captivated with the variety of landscapes and populations. In Iowa he relished what writer Willa Cather called “the sadness of all flat lands.”

Dvorak then composed his “New World Symphony” inspired by America’s wide-ranging culture—“an intended catalyst for an ‘American School’ of composition.” The symphony electrified New York audiences when it was first performed.

Horowitz wants young Americans to consider the idea that “great music” is not limited to a “pantheon of dead Europeans.” Thus with missionary-like zeal, he spreads the magic and magnitude of Dvorak’s American landscape. Horowitz adds: “This program offers a singular opportunity to infuse the arts and humanities into Social Studies, Art, English, and Music instruction in the classroom.”

It’s going to be a great summer!

JJ Abernathy may be contacted at jjabernathy@myway.com.