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..

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.

... [a] knotty cultural history.