The National Question

Although European composers had turned to folksongs for inspiration while writing instrumental pieces in the first half of the nineteenth century, their counterparts in the United States were much slower to adopt the practice. Given the country’s ethnically and racially diverse population, musicians did not reach a consensus about what folk music would be most appropriate to project an American national musical identity in the first place. By the early 1890s, however, the leading critic Henry Krehbiel had begun to argue that Antonín Dvořák would help US composers develop a folk-based style during his tenure as director of the National Conservatory.