Around eleven o'clock on Monday morning, I phone Dell Computers to query an invoice, but the accounts department is engaged, so I get put through instead to the development section of the first movement of the New World Symphony. The music I intrude on is intense and self-absorbed. I am like a child in a children's book who has stumbled through a gap in reality and fallen headlong into another world. I pick myself up and follow Dvorak's gangly, adolescent theme as it strides from instrument to instrument and key to key on its way home to the tonic. I think of it as healthy, wide-eyed and affirmative, trumpeting an ingenuous faith in energies which will lead to a new world far braver than any Dvorak might have imagined, the world of Dell Computers in Bracknell, of fax-modems, of the Internet, of telephones capable of pouring Dvorak's impassioned certainties into the ears of office workers on humdrum Monday mornings.

LRB 6 July 1995 | PDF Download