In this seven-minute video, Michael Parloff, Artistic Director of Parlance Chamber Concerts, introduces Antonín Dvořák’s String Quartet No. 12 in F (American).

He explains how Jeannette Thurber brought Antonin Dvorak and his family to New York, how African-American musicians influenced the master, how the song of the scarlet tanager was immortalized in the third movement, and how Dvorak composed the quartet around a simple pentatonic scale.