Saturday, Sept. 26, 2026, 7 P.M.

Buckley Recital Hall, Arms Music Center, Amherst College​

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Just as members of Amherst College's Class of 2030 begin their journeys to forge personal, professional and intellectual identities, in 1893 Dvorak's Symphony #9 demonstrated how the United States might break free from classical European traditions and speak in its own distinctive musical voice. The "New World" assimilates echoes of folk, black and Native American musics, and evokes America's own myths, as embodied in oral traditions and literature such as Longfellow's epic poem "Song of Hiawatha." 

The ASO's annual celebration of the first-year class opens with the exciting and flashy "festive" overture Inspiration! by the prodigious young Texan Quinn Mason, winner of the 2025 Morton Gould Composer Award, and also features Margaret Bonds' Troubled Water from her Spiritual Suite -- an iconic treatment of the classic Black spiritual "Wade in the Water."

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Program:

Quinn Mason: Inspiration! - A Festive Overture (2022)
Margaret Bonds: Troubled Waters (1967)
Antonin Dvorak: Symphony #9 in E minor ("From the New World") (1893)

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