The New World Suite

The New World Suiteis a ten-movement orchestral work composed by Ignatz Waghalter in New York between 1938 and 1939 for the Negro Symphony Orchestra — the institution he had founded the year before in Harlem. The Suite was never heard in the composer’s lifetime. The orchestra dissolved before the work could be performed; the manuscript lay among Waghalter’s papers for seventy years; and the New World Suite received its world premiere only in May 2019, in Poznań, Poland.

The Suite is the musical embodiment of the Harlem episode in Waghalter’s life. It carries the weight of an extraordinary cross-cultural collaboration: a Polish-Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, writing for an orchestra of African American musicians, in a city that had embraced him as Berlin no longer would. The New World Suite responds in audible terms to what Waghalter encountered in America — to its open spaces, the inflections of jazz, the aspirations of the musicians for whom the work was written, and to the democratic ideal of a new cultural world. Its ten short movements display, in concentrated form, the qualities that define Waghalter at his best: buoyancy, warmth, melodic abundance, an irrepressible optimism, and a lightness of orchestral hand that avoids the bombast of much late-Romantic writing.

The work also carries a theoretical weight that bears on the assessment of Waghalter’s entire output. It refutes — in the only way available to music, the way of audible evidence — the postwar image of Waghalter as a backward-looking late Romantic incapable of engaging with the world that had displaced him. The Suite engages the twentieth century from a different direction than the avant-garde: from the side of melody rather than the side of rupture, from the side of communicability rather than the side of estrangement. The two are not the same as backwardness and progress. They are alternative responses to the same historical crisis.