From the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra website:
"A butcher's son, an instinctive democrat, the composer Antonin Dvořák was self-made. No other European musician of comparable eminence so dedicated himself to finding 'America.' Dvořák’s quest was both concentrated and varied. And Dvořák's embrace was warm: he loved folk music, popular dance and song. He thrilled to Manhattan's polyglot population and in Iowa equally savored what Willa Cather called 'the sadness of all flat lands.'
Jeannette Thurber, a visionary educator, had lured Dvořák from Bohemia to direct her National Conservator of Music. And she handed him a mandate: to help New World composers create a concert idiom Americans would recognize as their own. Dvořák—the proud member of a Hapsburg minority subject to prejudice and discrimination—was galvanized by African-Americans and Native Americas. 'It is to the poor that I turn for musical greatness,' he told a New York reporter. 'The poor work hard; they study seriously.' And Dvořák predicted—his most famous, most controversial, most prophetic utterance—that the future music of the US would be based upon its 'Negro melodies.' In New York—then, as now, a city of immigrants—Dvořák's counsel was taken to heart. But in Brahmin Boston, Dvořák's view that black and 'red' Americans were representative was considered naive at best; Philip Hale, Boston's leading music critic, denounced him as a 'negrophile.'
There was a time when introducing young Americans to 'great music' meant venerating a pantheon of dead and distant Europeans. This is no longer done—but nothing has taken its place. The story of Dvořák's American sojourn, a vital and timely alternative, furnishes the subject matter for the Pittsburgh Symphony's NEH Summer Institute . . .
The instructors are nationally known scholars and educators. The schedule includes field trips and concerts, and culminating curricular projects. The curriculum ranges far afield from music to deal with such subjects as Buffalo Bill, immigration, the slave trade, The Song of Hiawatha, and Yellow Journalism. The core topic is the quest for American identity at the turn of the twentieth century."