Maurice Arnold

Mr. Urban attempted to discourage him when Arnold began to incorporate African-American "plantation" dance elements into his music.

Maurice Arnold was one of many African-American students of Antonín Dvořák during the Bohemian composer's stay in the United States as director of the newly formed National Conservatory of Music of America in New York (1892–1895).

And while the program included Arnold's four "American Plantation Dances" the main attraction of the evening was Dvořák's arrangement of Stephen Foster's "The Old Folks at Home" for chorus and orchestra.

His "Valse Elegante" for two pianos, eight hands is composed in a charming salon style typical of the time and easily performed with a quartet of amateur pianists.

Crusading against the "social sanctification of the arts" popular in certain circles of the day Dvořák stated in the New York Herald (May, 1893) "I am now convinced that the future music of this country must be built on the foundations of the song which are called Negro melodies.

The English horn solo in the second movement Largo made a lasting impression on Maurice Arnold and his fellow composition students, Harvey Worthington Loomis, William Arms Fisher, and Will Marion Cook.

William Arms Fisher adapted the English horn melody using his own text "Goin' Home" that eventually established itself as a popular Negro "spiritual."

Clara Gottschalk (the pianist, composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk's sister) wrote in the preface to her 1902 arrangements of "Creole songs," "if as Dr. Dvořák has claimed there is in time to be a native school of American music based on the primitive musical utterances of the red man and the black man these negro melodies are historical documents of some interest."

It was Still who finally did utilize the spiritual as a basis for one of the first important and original works for orchestra written by an African American, his "Afro-American Symphony" composed in 1930, seven years before Maurice Arnold's death in New York in 1937.