“Dworkin’s innate musicality and sense of timing serve him well in exploiting the dramatic arcs, musical peaks and valleys and transitions of mood, from somber and reflective, to passionate and heroic.” – Rosalyn Story, Violinist.com

This spoken word multimedia orchestral work tells the story of the USA through the prism of the life and words of America’s first President, George Washington. The work is set to Samuel Coleridge Taylor’s Symphonic Variations on an African Air. The American Rhapsody is a tribute to the ideals of courage, freedom and commitment while also serving as a story of vulnerability and the progression of humanity through the great injustices which plague our history. The victories and agonies of our past not only resonate with but inform our present as our nation seeks to find a pathway toward a more unified future.

The American Rhapsody excerpts a variety of speeches and writings by George Washington, with both prosaic and poetic interludes. A statesman, a general, and the commander-in-chief, Washington was an entrepreneur and a patriot who respected loyalty and fought against ignorance and division. He also favored education and the arts. He was eulogized as “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”

Through a process that results in a genre that Dworkin refers to as “musetry”, The American Rhapsody integrates and weaves together the literary content with the music of Samuel Coleridge Taylor. Despite rare performances, Symphonic Variations on an African Air is sonorous, evocative and beautifully orchestrated. As a set of variations, it offers a unified musical content that is at once pictorial and rare in its form.

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