It is appropriate that we should hear an “American” composition by a European composer in the week after The Fourth of July. On Wednesday the Aspen Music Festival brings the Cavani String Quartet to Harris Concert Hall, four enthusiastic and talented young women who will present two string quartets and a piano quintet. The Dvorák String Quartet in F major, opus 96, the twelfth of Dvorák’s fourteen string quartets, carries the nickname “American” and was in fact composed in 1893 on American soil during the composer’s sojourn here. In Iowa, of all places.

Although headquartered in New York during the three years of his time in America, Antonín Dvorák (1841-1904) took his family to Spillville, Iowa in the summer of 1893, a town with many Czech (Bohemian) residents, including relatives of his, for an extended stay. He composed the String Quartet in F in two weeks during that summer, and it was published the following year, in quartet form and also as an arrangement for piano duet. Although perhaps not as “American” as his vastly popular Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” composed just previously, the opus 96 quartet contains reflections of Dvorák’s American experience. “I should never have written these works ‘just so’ if I had never seen America,” the composer declared, and perhaps we can hear certain reflections of his American experience in the movements of this bright and cheerful string quartet. You may hear echoes of an African-American spiritual in the second movement, expressing the melancholy of homesickness that Dvorák himself suffered at this time, or in the third movement the song of a bird outside the composer’s window in Spillville, and perhaps even the sound of a locomotive or railway in the final movement. Echoes of America in Harris Hall this Wednesday.

Tom Buesch is a Professor of Communications and Humanities at Colorado Mountain College, Aspen Campus.