The Uses of Culture

A recent article on “Funding: The State of the Art” by my friend Andras Szanto makes for informative and depressing reading. “The search is on for a more compelling vocabulary” to rationalize and impel funding for the arts, Andras reports. The “latest linguistic developments” include applying “quality” not “as a mark of aesthetic sophistication,” but “to denote a positive human environment.” Good God, is it this difficult to make a persuasive case for the arts? A substantial portion of my professional life has been dedicated to studying, applying, and teaching the story of Dvorak in America (1892-1895). Essentially, this is a story about the uses of culture: how Dvorak helped Americans define and understand themselves. His New World Symphony (1893) was a mighty catalyst for discussion and debate: What was America? Who were Americans? Was plantation song “American folk song”? Were black and “red” Americans emblematic or representative of the American experience? In New York, Dvorak was received as a prophet; his outside perspective on American mores, American energies, American roots seemed acute, prescient, progressive. In Boston, he was dismissed as an interloper; he seemed naïve, obnoxious. He held up a mirror — as only culture can. I know no better tool for encapsulating the differences between these two defining American communities at the turn of the twentieth century. Dvorak received grateful letters from all over the nation. From Louisville, Mildred J. Hill, inspired by a Dvorak article in Harper’s (Feb. 1895), mailed him a collection of street cries with a note that she had traveled nearly 300 miles in order to hear the New World Symphony performed in Cincinnati. “I was so carried away by it that I determined to send you the enclosed examples. It takes a real southern person to really understand your work in that Symphony, in my humble opinion.” In addition to soaking up plantation song, prairie vacancy, and the elegiac fate of the “noble savage,” Dvorak’s symphony was specifically indebted to Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. Americans a century ago knew Dvorak’s symphony, knew Longfellow’s poem as part of a cultural vocabulary that informed both personal and national identity. In the 1860s, Americans knew the religious/scientific paintings of Frederic Church for the same reason: like the New World Symphony, like The Song of Hiawatha, “Heart of the Andes” and “Twilight in the Wilderness” were protean resonators. It amazes and frustrates me that American history is taught to young Americans as a parochial political/social narrative. How many high school American History courses routinely include Dvorak, Longfellow, and Church? There is no way of knowing the Gilded Age without them. Today, as ever, they enable us to ponder who we are. Here is some more on teaching Dvorak. Here is some more on Dvorak and America. My Wagner Nights: An American History recounts how Wagnerism held up a mirror to American notions of uplift, to American needs, aspirations, and achievements. Culture delights, provokes, inspires — and instructs.