Dvorak Teacher-Training

As anyone who is a parent or teacher keenly appreciates, the cultural vocabulary people of my generation (b. 1948) once took for granted is fast disappearing. High school students and college freshmen can no longer be expected to know Marlene Dietrich, or Rodgers & Hammerstein, or Porgy and Bess. Such knowledge was once instilled at home, or via Life Magazine or the Ed Sullivan Show. The absence of the arts and humanities in middle and high school classrooms is widely decried, but this is mainly lip service. In New York City (where I live), you can graduate from a “top” public or private high school without learning anything much about music or the visual arts. Compensatory action of some kind is urgent. The period I know best, as a cultural historian specializing in music, is America’s Gilded Age – the decades from the Civil War to 1900. It seems merely obvious to me that even the most cursory acquaintance with this period would necessarily include Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (once the best-known, most-read work of American literature) and the paintings of Frederic Church (which toured nationally to huge and appreciative audiences). Longfellow and Church apprise us how Americans have gone about understanding themselves. But they are not taught in American History classrooms. Nor is Dvorak’s New World Symphony (1893), which served a comparable function. In fact, the story of Dvorak in America (1892-1895) is a singular tool for integrating music, visual art, and literature into the Social Studies curriculum. It interfaces seamlessly with Longfellow and Church, with the Indian Wars and the slave trade, with plantation song and Stephen Foster, with Buffalo Bill and Yellow Journalism. As director of an NEH National Education program, I was able to write a young readers book, Dvorak and America, and to commission a state-of-the-art interactive Dvorak DVD from Robert Winter and Peter Bogdanoff at UCLA. These will be the core materials for a three-week NEH Teacher Training Institute hosted by the Pittsburgh Symphony this July. The eligibility requirements are liberal (e.g. administrators, librarians, home-school parents can apply). The deadline for applications is March 1. The faculty includes leading scholars of American painting and music (including Foster and blackface minstrelsy), as well as the bass-baritone Kevin Deas and the pianist Steven Mayer. The Pittsburgh Symphony website has complete information. That the Pittsburgh Symphony is the first orchestra ever to host an NEH institute is itself auspicious. Orchestras have valuable educational programs, but they tend to be satellite enterprises focused on elementary school and Young People’s Concerts. As orchestras continue to move toward a new model of inter-disciplinary thematic programming, new educational opportunities will emerge, facilitating linkage to high schools, universities, and colleges. Certainly they can play a vital role in reconstituting Social Studies instruction as a “vertical slice” embracing culture as an integral part of the national experience — and of personal identity.