Dvořák's prophecy And the vexed fate of Black classical music

Review by Booklist Review

"I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called the Negro melodies," visiting Czech composer Antonin Dvořák observed in 1893. "This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States." Save for Dvořák's own "New World" Symphony, George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, and Charles Ives's Symphony N. 2, classical-music historian Horowitz argues that Dvořák's "prophecy"--a prescription, really--has never materialized in the years since. Along with a classical-music world that has historically shunned African American composers and performers, Horowitz sees a falsely held American "pastlessness" that ignores the depth and breadth of the "sorrow songs" of America's slaves, a pastlessness that, internalized even by the likes of Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland, and Leonard Bernstein, has deprived the musical world of a truly vernacular American classical music. It's certainly a provocative claim, and Horowitz's narrative, informed as it is, isn't the easiest to track. Still, the full manifestation of Dvořák's vision is thrilling to consider.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

American classical music turned away from Black music and other folk traditions to its lasting detriment, according to this knotty cultural history from music critic and historian Horowitz (Artists in Exile). Reflecting on Czech composer Antonín Dvorák's 1893 declaration that American music would be "founded upon... negro melodies," Horowitz argues, that, on the contrary, American classical music went mainly in a Eurocentric, modernist direction that was uneasy with jazz and other Black influences, thus opening a permanent divide between highbrow art music and lowbrow pop music. He surveys some 20th-century Black classical composers, including William Dawson, Florence Price, and Harry Burleigh, but his focus is on such white composers as Charles Ives and George Gershwin, whose incorporation of Black vernacular styles into their works made them "the twin creative geniuses of American classical music." Rife with murky pronouncements--"as creative seedbeds, free societies are less efficacious than usable pasts"--much of the book is a tart polemic against 20th-century critics and composers including Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland for embracing a snooty modernism and for their "Oedipal" dismissal of forerunners who blended classical and vernacular music. Unfortunately, Horowitz's preoccupation with long-forgotten, avant-garde critical controversies make this interpretation of America's protean musical development feel dated. (Nov.)Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly identified Arthur Farwell as a Black composer.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Why is American classical music so White? In 1893, visiting Bohemian composer Antonin Dvořák predicted that a "great and noble school" of American classical music would build upon the nation's "negro melodies." Instead, writes music historian Horowitz, classical music in America became "a Eurocentric subsidiary," while African American melodies and rhythms were segregated in popular music. Yet Dvořák's prophecy encouraged Black composers, including his assistant, Harry Burleigh, and mixed-race Englishman Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, to compose classical works steeped in African American folk music that were widely performed and discussed at the turn of the 20th century. The villains in Horowitz's indictment are modernists Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Virgil Thomson, who all "maintained that there was no American music of consequence before 1910." White outliers such as Charles Ives, who unabashedly quoted from popular songs in his symphonies and sonatas, and George Gershwin, who wrote an opera with African American protagonists, were dismissed as eccentrics or sentimentalists. At the same time, African American composers William Grant Still, Florence Price, and William Levi Dawson, though taken seriously in the years between the world wars, plunged into obscurity because they didn't fit into the modernist narrative. Horowitz is unafraid to tackle the third-rail issue of cultural appropriation, coming down firmly on the side of artists' freedom to draw on any traditions that speak to them. He covers his back by enlisting African American tenor George Shirley to make the most forceful defense in a foreword: "I have no right to tell anyone they cannot perform the music of Black folk if they have the desire and ability to do so with proper respect for its content and distinctiveness." Horowitz closes with a clarion call for American classical music to "acquire a viable future, at last buoyed and directed by a proper past." His chronicle of "a failure of historical memory" is feisty and opinionated but always backed by solid evidence. Essential cultural history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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