In connection with VMMF’s concert “Collaboration,” The New Yorker music critic Alex Ross explores Dvořák’s interaction with African-American music, and particularly with the American composer and baritone Harry Burleigh. Burleigh’s meeting and ensuing friendship with Dvorak in New York had a lasting effect on Dvořák’s music, and subsequent Black composers found Dvořák to be a useful resource.

Alex Ross has been the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996. His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, published in 2007, won a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. An essay collection, Listen to This, appeared in 2010. His third book, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music, was published in 2020. Ross has received the George Peabody Medal, an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship.