Listening to the Symphony, From the New World, gives a picture of the United States. Dvorak was a Czech composer who is labelled a romantic. But Symphony 9 is an impressionist piece, crossing the music medium into visions of America in 1890. 

That year Dvorak came to America to teach and to compose in New York City. He spent summers in a community of Czech immigrants in Iowa. He left the United States after the Depression of 1893 cut off his $15,000 a year salary.

While on this continent Dvorak found musical composition short. America had home-grown composers, Louis Moreau Gottschalk (died 1869) who composed mostly short piano pieces, many of which Frederick Chopin liked. Edwin McDowell launched two piano concertos, short piano works and a few mid-grade orchestral works before he was committed to an asylum.

America was deprived of music except the popular variety. Like today, little of that lasts longer than a decade. Dvorak began the process with various works, the most notably the Symphony. 

The First movement is the new land, mostly untouched, some mature, yet inviting, mysterious and foreboding. He conveys all that in the movement, together.

The origins of the Second Movement are less complex. Dvorak wrote a Negro Spiritual. Upon arriving in New York, Dvorak engaged an African-American singer to sing Spirituals. Dvorak intellectualized the rhythm, theme, time and tenor of the Spiritual. He composed the movement. 

The Third Movement sounds Native American. It has repeating rhythms and themes throughout their development i.e. a theme, and turn it, invert it, run it slow, run it fast, run it every which way to make the music dramatic. Dvorak succeeded, in this scherzo of the Symphony. 

The Fourth Movement suggests business – an entrepreneurial spirit, through out the land, embedded in the people, the industrial age, a drive found in the wild life – buffalos, grizzly bears. It is not a steady progress but it moves; there is substance and force. At the end Dvorak does not conclude with a grand bang and no definite statement. There are lingering notes sounding like there is no termination of the United States. The country is not finished. Americans have accomplished much and have much progress by example at home. We cannot rest on our laurels. Our work is never done here. The remainder of the world might follow. 

The Founding Fathers recognized this fact. It left sovereignty, political power, with the American people, however joined or disconnected we are.