Summermusic 2026 No. 2 – Dvořák's American Summer and Arthur Foote Steps Out

Since we’re due for another heat wave this week, you should know the second of Market Square Concerts’ three Summermusic 2026 Concerts this Wednesday evening takes place in the air-conditioned comfort of Market Square Presbyterian Church at 7:30. The program features two American works – well, one by an American composer and the other, a work written here by a visiting European professor while on summer vacation. The program opens with a string quintet by Antonín Dvořák and concludes with the Piano Quintet by Boston-based composer Arthur Foote written just a few years later.

Our performers for this program include violinists Peter Sirotin, co-director of Market Square Concerts, and Claudia Chudacoff, former concertmaster of the Marine Band, violists Elias Goldstein and Hannah Rose Nicholas, and cellist Julian Schwarz (a frequent guest with the “Stuart & Friends” series, he will be appearing as soloist with the Harrisburg Symphony in January, 2027, with the new cello concerto Jennifer Higdon recently wrote for him). Stuart Malina, music director of the Harrisburg Symphony and frequent guest pianist with Market Square Concerts, will join the group for the second half of the concert for Foote’s Piano Quintet.

General Panorama of Spillville, Iowa (1895)

Antonín Dvořák

Antonín Dvořák's name – and more importantly his music – is well known to American audiences. He is also something of an Honorary American Composer because of three works he composed while he was in America: his Symphony in E Minor, “From the New World;” his String Quartet in F Major, “American;” and, perhaps a little less frequently played, his String Quintet in E-flat Major, also known as “American.” There's also a Sonatina for Violin & Piano known as the “American,” a Suite in A Major (originally for piano which he also orchestrated while living here) known as the “American;” the Cello Concerto, which was mostly written while he was in New York City, escaped being known as the “American” Cello Concerto.

Having taken Jeanette Thurber up on a paycheck he couldn't refuse, Dvořák became the Director of her National Conservatory in New York City, and sailed across the ocean blue to arrive on Manhattan on September 27th, 1892, just in time for the 400th Anniversary of Columbus' “discovery.” In August, he'd already begun a 20-minute cantata based on a belatedly submitted text, The American Flag, but since it couldn't be ready in time for the planned Columbus Day celebrations, it ended up not being premiered until May, 1895, by which time Mrs. Thurber's money had run out and Dvořák had already returned to his native Bohemia.

Dvořák & Family posing on the steps of their New York home, 1893

But within days of finishing his “Columbus Cantata” (as he called it) one cold January day, he began a new symphony, the one he called From the New World, which he completed on May 24th, 1893. A week later, the rest of his family arrived from Bohemia for the summer, posed for a group photo on the steps of the Dvořáks' home at 327 E.17th Street (see above), and then in a few days left for Spillville, Iowa. While you might think Spillville, IA, is not high on the list of Vacation Destinations, even in the 1890s, there is a more personal explanation.

It was his secretary and translator, Josef Kovarík, an American-born Czech who'd suggested the holiday: it was his home town and Kovarík's father was still a prominent businessman there. Given its large Czech population, it seemed a good way to assuage Dvořák's homesickness and his interest in seeing more of America than just noisy and crowded New York City.

Shortly after they arrived, he began sketching a new string quartet, completed in eight days. Three days later, he began a string quintet, adding another viola to the standard quartet (perhaps in Kovarík's honor: he was a violist), and then finished that on August 1st, a little over a month later. Obviously, the town of Spillville agreed with him.

The quartet incorporated the song of the scarlet tanager Dvořák heard on his walks in the town's Riverside Park – he was delighted to have heard birds singing for the first time in eight months – and in the fourth movement one could detect echoes of the organ from the local church which he would play every morning before walking along the Turkey River. In the quintet, listeners claim to hear the sound of the Native American drums accompanying the ritual song of the Iroquois Indians – from the Kickapoo tribe – who visited Spillville that summer to sell their herbal remedies. “Dvořák was enchanted by the performances they gave to promote their wares and, for the duration of their stay in the village, he apparently attended every one.”

Aside from an unexpected disruption to attend the Chicago “World's Fair” in mid-August to celebrate “Czech Day” where he conducted a hastily organized concert of his works, he had only two more weeks of his holiday before Dvořák reluctantly left to return to New York on September 16th.

Unfortunately, he never had a chance to return to Spillville: ten years later, a year before his death, he told a friend he'd thought Spillville “was an ideal spot; that’s when I felt happy, and I should have stayed there.”

The Quintet is in the standard four movements with the scherzo in second place – (1.) Allegro non tanto; (2) Allegro vivo; (3) Larghetto (4.) Finale: Allegro giusto. This performance was recorded by the Emerson Quartet with violist Paul Neubauer.
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This is, above all, relaxed and pastoral music, the kind of souvenir one might expect following a Big City Adventure, a chance to return a bit to his roots, however transplanted to the New World. Dvořák claimed he wanted to write “something really melodious and simple” that summer. Dvořák was known for his melodies – his effortlessness with a tune was one of the things that attracted Brahms' attention in the first place almost twenty years earlier – and there is certainly nothing remotely academic-sounding about the structure or harmony, flowing with an unbuttoned ease from one tune to another, despite its own formal integrity. It's easy for a listener to imagine “an Indian drumbeat” in the second movement's scherzo or in the second theme of the finale, perhaps evidence of the Kickapoo “medicine show” Dvořák had witnessed.

Many of these tunes are built on “exotic-sounding” pentatonic scales – just as there are in the “New World” Symphony – but they're no more primitive Americana than they are when you find them in Czech, East-European, or even Scottish folk music, much less the stereotypical sound of Asian music when played just on the black keys of the piano.

In the third movement, after the somber introduction, you'll hear a hymn-like theme, the basis for a set of variations, that might well be Dvořák's attempt to set a new tune to the words of “My Country 'Tis of Thee” (it had been suggested he try to write a new “American anthem” to those famous words). And while there can be nothing simpler than the childlike joy of the humoresque that opens the finale – you remember Dvořák's Humoresque, the famous one? – it's more likely you'll hear a new “open-hearted,” untroubled, straightforward, and certainly less rigorous style. This was the America Dvořák found in the rolling countryside of northeast Iowa, a sensibility he embraced wholeheartedly.

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Arthur Foote

Most American concert-goers would be hard-pressed to say they’re “familiar” with music by any American composer before 1900 – or at least, one way or another, before Charles Ives, that innovator of American music better known than heard.

Yet you’d think, considering our history technically goes back before 1776, there’d at least be something comparable to what was going on in Europe: Mozart and Haydn during the early years of the Republic, Beethoven around the time of our War of 1812, or Brahms and Wagner in the decade or so after the Civil War.

The truth is, there was very little market for classical music in the New World. The popular mood was for dance music and hymns – feeding the secular and spiritual needs of a hard-working population – while the wealthier Americans imported what they needed from their distant ancestral homelands and would have considered anything by American artists too plebian to decorate their cultural lives with.

European Art was considered edifying and appreciating it (and certainly owning it) was a sign of intelligence as well as wealth. American culture, such as it was, couldn't compete on an intellectual or even an aesthetic level with European culture's long and brilliant history. This attitude can be found in many American literary works but especially in the novels of Henry James with their constant friction between established European culture and the rough-around-the-edges newly minted Americans looking for acceptance in the world, especially in novels like A Portrait of a Lady and his last major novel, The Golden Bowl.

Besides, painters may have painted American scenes but they did so in English or German fashion; poets may have written about American subjects but – with one glaring exception – they wrote in English or German styles (the exception was and always will be Walt Whitman).

The same could be said for literature at least on the surface but here there were more distinct and distinctly American voices despite their cultural roots. The written word, at least, had deeper roots in American society.

America was viewed as an economic possibility for touring musicians and we, in our early centuries, would no doubt have benefited from visiting figures had transatlantic travel been easier. It was the amount of time cooped up on a ship that deterred Robert and Clara Schumann from following through on plans for an American tour. But, like Anton Rubinstein or Camille Saint-Saëns afterward, these visits were primarily to make as much money as quickly as possible and then return to the comforts and familiarity of home.

Much of the basis of what became our musical life here was founded or assisted by those fleeing history: the French Revolution or the decades of Napoleonic wars that followed; the series of mostly failed revolutions of 1848-1849 across much of Europe.

Even though he may have had little impact on the musical life of his adopted country, Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, the collaborator on such masterpieces as Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro, fled creditors more than history and opened the first academic course in Italian literature in this country, introducing us to the likes of Dante. In addition, he also would run a country store in Sunbury PA, of all places, driving his supply wagons through Harrisburg on his way to and from Philadelphia. If nothing else, his conversations with a young man who worked for him named Simon Cameron helped instill in the boy an interest in cultural things unknown in this land. As a cabinet member during the Civil War, did Cameron ever have discussions with Abraham Lincoln about the finer points of Mozart operas? It may have only been one more reason Lincoln referred to his erstwhile Secretary of War (and former Ambassador to Russia) as “The Tsar of Pennsylvania.”

Anyone who wanted to become a composer in this country went to Europe to study. There were no conservatories here, not even university music departments. In fact, when John Knowles Paine offered lectures in music at Harvard where he was chapel organist and choirmaster, the faculty wondered why. In the early-1860s, he was allowed to give lectures but there were no credits available toward a degree – consequently, there were few students.

It was only later in 1870 that his lectures were given official recognition: a course in harmony was successful enough to warrant setting up a course in counterpoint and with it, eventually, course credit.

In 1875, Paine – a composer already recognized in Europe, most likely the first American (after Louis Moreau Gottschalk) to achieve international fame – finally became the first official Professor of Music in America. His plan for Harvard became the accepted model for music departments across the United States.

I mention all this because Arthur Foote was 21 when he graduated from Harvard in 1873, having taken Paine’s music classes, even though his plan was to go into the practice of law. It wasn’t until he started taking organ lessons to pass that first summer he decided music should be his career. In two years, he began a career as a music teacher in Boston, a profession he enjoyed for over sixty years. In addition to being organist at Boston’s First Unitarian Church until 1910, he also helped found the American Guild of Organists.

Technically, he is the first of that generation of composers who did not go to Europe to study. He is an entirely home-grown American composer. His style, for the most part, bears all the hallmarks of European standards, conservative and Victorian which itself was largely Germanic and often derivative of Brahms.

But like many of his generation, he has been forgotten, largely overshadowed by the innovative composers who came with the New Century, particularly Charles Ives (Yale, Class of 1898) and later Aaron Copland (who, ironically, went to Paris to become the first American pupil of the French teacher, Nadia Boulanger in 1921).

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Here is a recording of Foote’s Piano Quintet with pianist Mary Louise Boehm, violinists Kees Kooper and Alvin Rogers, violist Richard Maximoff, and cellist Fred Sherry, a recording currently available on the Albany label but which I’d owned years ago on the Vox label. It’s in four movements which was posted on YouTube in three clips:
1st Mvmt

2nd Mvmt

3rd & 4th Mvmts

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So, where does this Piano Quintet fit into the world of Arthur Foote?

It’s tempting to compare it to Brahms’ Piano Quintet especially when there are so few well-known works in the genre to begin with (imagine if there were only four string quartets that got any regular performance-time?). It certainly sounds like Brahms, at least on the surface, but Foote is more interested in the harmonic world of Brahms’ romanticism, not its underlying structure and counterpoint.

In Boston in the 1890s, Brahms was certainly not a “conservative” force. Today, we tend to lump Brahms and Wagner together as “two leading German Romanticists,” unaware how vibrantly (and often violently) different they were from each other to their contemporaries: if Wagner had started by creating “Music of the Future,” a term borrowed from his future father-in-law Franz Liszt, Brahms was looking back at the legacy of Beethoven and Bach (the conductor Hans von Bülow coined the idea of the Three B’s more as a marketing gimmick than a reflection of Brahms’ perceived placement in the musical firmament). But Brahms’ love of contrapuntal writing turned most of his American listeners off (the famous comment “Exit in case of Brahms” originated in Boston).

Dvořák, on the other hand, was a kind of “Poor Man’s Brahms” – the best elements of Brahms with his tunefulness and ability to switch between drama and lyricism combined with a populist folk-like style and lively dance rhythms that animated so much of Dvořák’s music whether it was written in Bohemia, Vienna or New York City (or, like his American chamber music, Spillville, IA).

Even so, we think Dvořák’s idea about building an American Voice out of the use of American Folk-Songs – especially the spirituals of the American Negro – was a huge influence on the national scene. In fact, though he says he never quoted folk songs himself but only “wrote in the spirit” of these tunes, it wasn’t until later that composers took him literally, still arguing about exactly what an “American folk song” was.

Rubin Goldmark, a student of Dvořák’s who would go on to teach Aaron Copland as a teen-ager, and advise George Gerswhin on his Concerto in F, composed a Hiawatha Overture as well as a Negro Rhapsody. There were the “Indianists” who found inspiration in the songs and rhythms of the Native Americans like Preston Ware Orem whose “Indian Rhapsody” for piano sounds more like one of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies superimposed on a few meager Native American ideas ("meager" because, being limited and intended mostly for repetition, they do not lend themselves to being developed in the way European composers would expand their structures).

But most of America’s already established composers in the 1890s – especially those in Boston, the conservative antipode to America’s futuristic New York City – rejected Dvořák’s idea. Amy Beach (then known as Mrs. H. H. A. Beach) went so far as to write a symphony based on actual themes and folk songs from her British heritage which in 1896 became her Gaelic Symphony.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t “American elements” in Arthur Foote’s quintet aside from the homage to Brahms. He was, after all, a thoroughly American composer, born and trained here, but his Americanisms are no less American than Dvořák’s were – the essence of the idea rather than the substance of it – and I think unless he wrote specifically somewhere that he was in fact incorporating American themes into his music, we might probably be making assumptions of what it sounds like to us today rather than how it might have been perceived by his contemporaries over a century ago as well as by the composer himself.

Does that lessen the quality of the piece? No, not at all.

The Quintet as well as his most frequently performed piece (if the term is applicable at all), the Suite in E for Strings, and other works like his tone poems In the Mountains and Francesca da Rimini deserve to be heard if only in the context of a culture trying to find its voice.

There is, for instance, a Cello Concerto that was performed in 1894 by the recently formed Chicago Symphony: consider that Victor Herbert’s 2nd Cello Concerto was premiered in March 1894 and Dvořák began composing his that November, what could Foote’s Cello Concerto add to the fairly limited cello repertoire? (If you're curious, here's an article about Julian Schwarz uncovering Foote's Cello Concerto!)

Will Arthur Foote’s Piano Quintet replace the Brahms Quintet on chamber music programs throughout America? Not very likely. It’s not sufficiently “substantial” (given our preference for the Masterpiece Quotient) to be the main "draw" for your typical chamber music program, nor is its composer recognizable enough to attract big crowds (in as much as chamber music ever does).

Could it stand being heard once in a while instead of one of the Big Four Quintets – those masterpieces by Schumann, Brahms, Dvořák and Shostakovich?

Yes, please.

- Dick Strawser