Waiting At the End of the Road. Part II. The Dvorak Connection.
by
Sudhalter and Evans in Man and Legend.
They began [this refers to the Whiteman Sep 13, 1929 recording session]. Two more takes fluffed outright, though not this time through any fault of Bix. They then got a good one, and Whiteman signaled to try one more just for insurance. This time they played the arrangement, with its interpolated quotes from the Going Home theme of Dvoraks New World Symphony, impeccably. Bixs solo was clean, open-tone, betraying nothing of how he was feeling.
[Incidentally, here Sudhalter feels the solo is played by Bix; later, he changed his mind.]
The interpolated quote(s) mentioned in Man and Legend appears in the introduction. Sudhalter and Evans mention quotes in plural. I hear the quote in the intro. Any other quote? Here is the intro by Whiteman and a piece of the second movement (Largo) of Antonin Dvoraks 9th Symphony "From the New World" performed by the USAF-Big Band.
Dvoraks hunting theme became extremely popular with words added and titled Going Home Deanna Durbin sang it in one of her movies, It Started With Eve Watch and listen
The symphony [New World] was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, and premiered on December 16, 1893 at Carnegie Hall conducted by Anton Seidl. A day earlier, in an article published in the New York Herald on December 15, 1893, Dvoák further explained how Native American music had been an influence on this symphony:
"I have not actually used any of the [Native American] melodies. I have simply written original themes embodying the peculiarities of the Indian music, and, using these themes as subjects, have developed them with all the resources of modern rhythms, counterpoint, and orchestral color."
In the same article, Dvoák stated that he regarded the symphony's second movement as a "sketch or study for a later work, either a cantata or opera ... which will be based upon Longfellow's [The Song of] Hiawatha" (Dvoák never actually wrote such a piece). He also wrote that the third movement scherzo was "suggested by the scene at the feast in Hiawatha where the Indians dance".
Curiously enough, passages which modern ears perceive as the musical idiom of African-American spirituals may have been intended by Dvoák to evoke a Native American atmosphere. In 1893, a newspaper interview quoted Dvoák as saying "I found that the music of the negroes and of the Indians was practically identical", and that "the music of the two races bore a remarkable similarity to the music of Scotland".[4][5] Most historians agree that Dvoák is referring to the pentatonic scale, which is typical of each of these musical traditions.
It has been claimed that the theme from the largo was adapted into a spiritual-like song "Goin Home," by black composer Harry Burleigh, whom Dvoák met during his American sojourn, and lyricist William Arms Fisher,[9] but the song was actually written by Fisher and based on Dvorak's Largo theme.