When Antonin Dvorak arrived in New York to teach at the National Conservatory of Music, he was given the daunting task of creating an American National Music for a young national confident in its resources, but still looking to Europe for a sense of identity. When he announced that American music already had a source -- "based on Negro melodies" -- he not only sparked controversy, but invigorated an already burgeoning community of African-American musicians. Filmmaker Lucille Carra combines both classical and popular music, Dvorak's original music scores for "The New World Symphony," and "The American Quartet," unpublished personal letters, oral histories, rare wax cylinder recordings, and sumptuously photographed locations in Prague, New York and the American prairies, to reveal the musical links between cultures.
—Lucille Carra, writer