From the New World with Daniel Wiley

From the New World, featuring Artistic Director Candidate Daniel Wiley, highlights and champions music originating from and inspired by various aspects of American culture. We set the stage with one our foundational musical genres, the spiritual. Deeply rooted in African American culture, the spiritual often focuses on overcoming intense adversity brought on by slavery and discrimination. Our opening set of pieces, Festival of American Spirituals and Three Spirituals, include famous and recognizable melodies such as: Little David, Play on Your Harp, Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child, Ezekiel Saw the Wheel, Were You There?, Joshua, Nobody Know the Trouble I’ve Seen, Everytime I Feel the Spirit, and several others. These arrangements demonstrate the depth, color, and impact that the spiritual has had on our musical identity as Americans.

The first half closes with the symphonic masterpiece, An American in Paris, which pays tribute to another great American musical genre, jazz. The composer George Gershwin is best known for his successes on Tin Pan Alley and Broadway; and his compositional voice is often described as a unique blend of “classical” and “jazz”. Inspired by his time in Paris around 1928, Gershwin set out to write a symphonic tone poem that incapsulated his experiences during the Annés folles, which can best be described as the French version of the roaring twenties. An instant success, An American in Paris soon inspired the 1951 film of the same name.

The second half features another staple of the orchestral repertoire, Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 “From the New World”. Composed in 1893 during his tenure as Director of the National Conservatory of Music of America, Dvořák became fascinated with the idea of finding a unifying American musical voice. This curiosity led him to work with an African American student named Harry T. Burleigh, who sang Spirituals for him. Convinced that the spiritual, as well as Native American music, was the “future music of this country”, Dvořák set out to exemplify these American genres in a symphonic form, the result of which became his Symphony No. 9 “From the New World”.

This concert is one of five being presented in the 2024-2025 season featuring Artistic Director/Conductor candidates and is being offered free and open to the public as part of Orchestra Indiana’s efforts to reintroduce orchestral music to the community and engage new audiences in East Central Indiana. This concert will be held at Muncie Central High School’s Auditorium. Auditorium doors will open one hour before the concert.

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