Menu
Dvorak’s Prophecy: And the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music
Bottom of the pile
3
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
Critics
7/100Scholars
Author:
Joseph Horowitz, George Shirley
Publisher:
W.W. Norton & Company
Date:
November 23, 2021
In 1893 the composer Antonin Dvorák foresaw a great and noble school of American classical music based on the searing melodies he had excitedly discovered among Black communities in the United States. Yet his "prophecy" did not come to pass. Horowitz explores the overwhelming whiteness of classical music in Americaâhow it got to be that way and what can be done about it.
What The Reviewers Say
Mr. Horowitz writes powerfully and with enviable authority. In examining Thomson’s views, he discusses Van Wyck Brooks’s ideas about a 'usable past.' He connects Ives’s use of vernacular musical sources in the composer’s third symphony with Mark Twain’s use of vernacular speech in Huckleberry Finn. He bolsters his treatment of musical nostalgia by considering nostalgic elements in the paintings of John Singer Sargent. Possibly Mr. Horowitz overrates Ives and underrates Copland, but his positions are always clearly staked out and amply supported.
The book is a timely contribution to our growing national recognition that this type of exclusion characterizes most aspects of American culture.
... it mostly appeals to aesthetic and historical debates about the meaning of 'Black classical music,' resulting in the glaring omission of racism as a structural force with profound effects for individuals.
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..
