This first film in the series keys on Dvořák’s prophecy and explores its present⁠-⁠day pertinence. His New World Symphony, still the best⁠-⁠known and best⁠-⁠loved symphonic work conceived on American soil, is saturated with the influence of plantation song, and also with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. This act of appropriation, as the film argues, was an act of empathy performed by a great humanitarian. The musical selections here are mainly taken from the Hiawatha Melodrama (Naxos 8.559777), which author Joseph Horowitz co⁠-⁠composed with the music historian Michael Beckerman, with orchestrations by Angel Gil⁠-⁠Ordóñez.

Steeped in nostalgia, in his Danbury childhood and the New England Transcendentalists with whom he profoundly identified, in the American experience of race which he absorbed from his Abolitionist grandparents, Ives used the past with consummate empathy and brave artistry. The music at hand here includes his Second Symphony (a milestone in culling the vernacular to set beside Huckleberry Finn), The Housatonic at Stockbridge (possibly the most sublime nature reverie in the American orchestral repertoire), and The St Gaudens in Boston Common (a singular ghost dirge in tribute to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw’s Black Civil War regiment). We also hear portions of Ives’s Concord Sonata performed by Steven Mayer (an interpretation seasoned by a lifetime of advocacy) and half a dozen Ives songs peerlessly sung (in live performance with Paul Sanchez) by William Sharp.

Buffeted by social and political currents, Copland can seem unmoored: a cork in a stream. He was politicised by the Depression – and by the example of Mexico, whose artists galvanised national identity and progressive thought. This film features a re⁠-⁠enactment of Copland’s grilling by Senator Joseph McCarthy (played by Edward Gero). It also highlights the most consequential Copland score we don’t know: his ingenious music for Lewis Mumford’s 1939 World’s Fair film The City (Naxos DVD 2.110231), itself a complex product of the Popular Front. We reconsider the valedictory Piano Fantasy (Naxos 8.559184), in which Copland refreshed his modernist roots – a galvanising performance by Benjamin Pasternack, who also recalls a telling encounter with the composer.

Hollywood’s supreme film composer was a casualty of the standard narrative – as he himself was bitterly aware. Not only were his movie scores high creative accomplishments; Bernard Herrmann was a formidable – and formidably unfashionable – concert composer whose Souvenirs de voyage for clarinet quintet may be the most beautiful chamber music by an American. His Psycho Narrative, which we also sample, surpasses the Psycho Suite we normally hear. He honed his gift for dramatising the spoken word as the pre⁠-⁠eminent composer for a genre no longer remembered: the radio drama. We sample Whitman from 1944 (Naxos 8.559883) – a Norman Corwin radio play that deserves to live as a concert work. It also exemplifies how radio, an unprecedented mass medium, once consolidated the American experience, its biggest star being Franklin D. Roosevelt.

No non-Western musical idiom has so impacted on the Western concert tradition as Indonesian gamelan, beginning with the Javanese Pavilion at the 1889 Paris Exposition: an epiphany. Sampling gamelan⁠-⁠inspired works by Debussy, Ravel, and McPhee, our film arrives at a paragon exemplar of cultural fusion – Lou Harrison – and a pair of concertos, for violin and piano, unsurpassed by those of any other American. The composer/scholar Bill Alves demonstrates the layered complexity of Javanese gamelan, and how it translates into keyboard textures composed by Harrison for Keith Jarrett. For Harrison’s Concerto for Violin and Percussion (Naxos 8.559825), we tour the ‘junk percussion’ – including flower pots and washtubs – that Harrison made sing and dance.

If George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess – the highest creative achievement in American classical music – embodies a glorious (and controversial) fulfilment of Dvořák’s prophecy, there also exists a buried lineage of exceptional compositions by Black composers following in Dvořák’s wake. Coming first was his assistant Harry Burleigh, whose seminal settings of Deep River are as much compositions as transcriptions. Burleigh’s initiative was sealed by singers like Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson. But William Levi Dawson’s oracular Negro Folk Symphony (Naxos 8.559870), though triumphantly premiered by Leopold Stokowski and his Philadelphia Orchestra in 1934, gathered dust – and Dawson was never to create the symphonic catalogue he seemed destined to undertake.