New World

KNOX "New World (after Dvořák)"

In 1893, far from his native Bohemia, Antonín Dvořák completed his Symphony No. 9, "From the New World." Surrounded by the sounds of a country not his own, what he wrote into the score was homesickness. That melody is still sung today, under the name "Goin' Home." A song about returning.

"New World (after Dvořák)" sends that letter back the other way. Not from the new world, but toward one. Where the original sang about a place to return to, this song is sung by those who no longer have one.

Its lyrics look at the screens burning somewhere every night, and at what we have become in front of them people who learned to look and scroll on. Told for years that something better was being built, we now step over the children of that promise. The ones who hold the matches never stand inside the flame. Every anthem sung together leaves somebody standing outside. The water is at the gate, and the argument is still about the wording.

And yet what the song finally asks for is remarkably small. Not a grand ideal, not a just world. A kitchen with the evening light still on. Plates set out for the ones who won't come home. An ordinary evening, the kind that used to be ordinary.

It goes there anyway. Even if it means never finding the way back.

KNOX
Vo. tomo / Gt. kana / Gt. ryo / Ba. emi / Dr. hazu

Antonín Dvořák's Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95, "From the New World" is in the public domain.
KNOX is a virtual band created using AI.