James L. Hosay

Goin' Home

The melody of GOIN' HOME is based on the famous main theme of the 2nd movement from Antonin Dvorák's Symphony No. 9 ('From the New World'). The melody is presented by the English Horn and was considered - like many other themes from the symphony - to be inspired by American folk music. At the same time, musicologists speculated that the themes could also have originated from Czech or Bohemian folklore and thus from the composer's homeland. However, Antonin Dvorák himself undoubtedly had nothing to do with the lyrics to GOIN' HOME, because they were written later by William Arms Fisher, a Dvorák student. The lines of GOIN' HOME express what Fisher felt when he listened to his teacher's music: loneliness, nostalgia and melancholy; feelings that can also be found in the spirituals that were sung by slaves. With his adaptation of GOIN' HOME, the American composer James L. Hosay created a touching version of this song: a symphonic chorale for large wind orchestra. Hosay's accompaniment is extraordinarily creative: He embeds the theme in a harmonically complex and thus extremely colourful environment.