This sonatina from Antonin Dvořák dates from the same period as the New world symphony, and uses the same type of material, but in a much smaler scale and in a more intimate way... Dvořák was the host of a Czech community, a small village in the States... he was extremely intrigued by the tunes and the melodies sung by the black workers in the fields... He thought they were indians! and a second thing that he missed was the fact that those workers having heard there employers singing and playing their folkmusic (Czech are always very active in that way!), they had incorporate it in their own... much the same way in which Scott Joplin had incorporated in his own music what he had heard as a kid, hiding under the grand piano of his parents employers when their daughter played Mendelssohn, Schubert, Johann Strauß... Therefore the title of the second movement "Indian lament"!...
Like for the new world symphony and also the American quartet, most of the tunes of the sonatine are based on what is called a "pentatonic scale" a scale made of only 5 notes (like O Susannah, and "il était une bergère") but present in many folklores, particularly from Ireland where it got to America...
For more music and more discoveries :
www.jeanclaudeferet.net
But, unfortunately for the moment, the texts are still only in French (but music goes over that border isn't it !).