Dvorak's Prophecy: And the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2021
A provocative interpretation of why classical music in America "stayed white"—how it got to be that way and what can be done about it.
In 1893 the composer Antonín Dvorák prophesied a “great and noble school” of American classical music based on the “negro melodies” he had excitedly discovered since arriving in the United States a year before. But while Black music would foster popular genres known the world over, it never gained a foothold in the concert hall. Black composers found few opportunities to have their works performed, and white composers mainly rejected Dvorák’s lead.
Joseph Horowitz ranges throughout American cultural history, from Frederick Douglass and Huckleberry Finn to George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and the work of Ralph Ellison, searching for explanations. Challenging the standard narrative for American classical music fashioned by Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, he looks back to literary figures—Emerson, Melville, and Twain—to ponder how American music can connect with a “usable past.” The result is a new paradigm that makes room for Black composers, including Harry Burleigh, Nathaniel Dett, William Levi Dawson, and Florence Price, while giving increased prominence to Charles Ives and George Gershwin.
Dvorák’s Prophecy arrives in the midst of an important conversation about race in America—a conversation that is taking place in music schools and concert halls as well as capitols and boardrooms. As George Shirley writes in his foreword to the book, “We have been left unprepared for the current cultural moment. [Joseph Horowitz] explains how we got there [and] proposes a bigger world of American classical music than what we have known before. It is more diverse and more equitable. And it is more truthful.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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. Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly identified Arthur Farwell as a Black composer.
