Playing Dvorak's American Quartet was one of the best musical experiences of my life, and I'm grateful to the natural environment around Spillville, if it could

Playing Dvorak's American Quartet was one of the best musical experiences of my life, and I'm grateful to the natural environment around Spillville, if it could enable Dvorak to produce such a work. There's nothing American about the music, by the way; it's just as satisfyingly Bohemian as the rest of Dvorak's music, even if he was self-consciously using a pentatonic scale, and may have tried to sound American. I think he was so perfectly steeped in his own culture and his own sound that anything he wrote came out sounding like him and his place. (And by the way, best viola melody ever.)