Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 14

Marian Anderson, Soundbites, and “Dvorak’s Prophecy”

The Conclusion to my book-in-progress When the Arts Mattered: An Exhortation begins:

“No viewer could possibly glean the hypnotic impact of Marian Anderson from watching the 2022 public television documentary ‘The Whole World in Her Hands.’ Over the course of one hour and 53 minutes, she is rarely permitted to perform or speak for as long as a minute without some form of distraction – a photograph, a film, a voice-over advisory. When the moment comes for ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee’ on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial – a mesmerizing newsreel clip – she sings for 17 seconds before a re-enacted commentary takes precedence (‘I as an individual was not important on that day – it happened to be the people I represented’), accompanied by an inter-racial gallery of American faces; the singing continues as a backdrop.  

“A previous Marian Anderson documentary, produced by Kultur Films, is a little more lenient. But one has to go back 1957 – to Edward R. Murrow and ‘See It Now’ – to encounter a fundamentally different approach. Documenting Anderson’s recent tour of Asia, this 25-minute commercial TV show is sufficiently patient that one can engage in the moment. Her performance of ‘He’s Got the Whole World in his Hands’ unfolds gloriously, in four contrasting verses. And we feel privileged to see her sing a four-minute operatic aria with the fledgling Bombay City Symphony. No one feels impelled to inform us that Marian Anderson is a great artist.

“It would take a cognitive psychologist to adequately explore the pertinent costs of the soundbite mentality, now so ubiquitous that we do not even notice that our engagement with screens is necessarily superficial.”

Thanks to Naxos – a singular enterprise whose fearless sense of adventure is personified by its founder and ageless mastermind Klaus Heymann —  my six “Dvorak’s Prophecy” documentary films are readily available via DVD or via the Naxos Video Library. They link to my book Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music. And – radically and tenaciously – they reject the soundbite template. 

A new mega-review of the book and the films, by Mark Grant in The American Scholar, says it all:

“Can anything be done to effect a rapprochement between the old and the new paradigms so that the heritage of classical music can be revivified for younger generations? One possible answer is being suggested by the scholar and critic Joseph Horowitz in his new book Dvořák’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music. Horowitz seems to say that it’s not necessary to topple canonical classical music idols as if they were the Buddhas of Bamiyan, because a rich parallel heritage of African-American classical music has been hiding in plain sight all along. He has assumed the role of a skilled art conservator who is cleaning up an old master, removing an overlayer to disclose a pentimento: an underlayer that is a veritable classical music 1619 project. And at the same time, in a series of six companion videos that he narrates (Dvořák’s Prophecy: A New Narrative for American Classical Music, produced by Naxos), Horowitz goes a good way toward remediating the problematic aspects of media literacy, sound-bite epistemology, Snapchat concentration spans, and ahistorical narcissism that bedevil our culture today.

“Horowitz also argues that the primary champion and practitioner of Native American–based art music, the white Anglo-American composer Arthur Farwell, has not only been unfairly neglected, but is also still vexed by the charge of cultural appropriation. These and other questions are teased out both in his book and in the accompanying six videos, which focus on Dvořák, Ives, Black composers, Bernard Herrmann, Lou Harrison, and Copland, respectively. As a group, these videos (along with a CD of Farwell’s music) sweep together a vast canvas of . . . Americana . . . All are interestingly told. The video documentaries eschew the Ken Burns style of rapid montage and instead go into deep focus. Talking heads speak at length rather than in sound bites. The music on the soundtracks, performed by the Washington, D.C.–based PostClassical Ensemble (of which Horowitz is executive director) and conducted by Angel Gil-Ordóñez, is not interrupted by hyperkinetic visual montages or multiple voiceovers. It’s the documentary equivalent of “slow food”; there is room to absorb and think and remember. . . .

“The videos are fascinating and should be widely purchased and used by educators and institutions throughout the country to proselytize the unconverted. If classical music is going to survive and thrive, we need zealous advocates like Joseph Horowitz to continue beating the drum.”

To sample (and purchase) the six “Dvorak’s Prophecy” films – and strike a blow against soundbite reductionism — click here. 

Revueltas and Social Justice on NPR

At the top of today’s 50-minute National Public Radio feature on Silvestre Revueltas – the fourth radio documentary I’ve produced for the WAMU newsmagazine “1A” – I observe:

“Art promoting social justice is everywhere upon us. It’s what our composers and visual artists and playwrights want to produce, it’s what presenters want to present, it’s what our foundations want to fund. We all feel that we’re responding to a state of emergency, especially with regard to issues of race and social justice – and that includes composer of classical music.”

You can hear it here.  

Mexico, in the 1920s and ‘30s, was a place where political art flourished. The political murals of Diego Rivera, the political music of Silvestre Revueltas rose above ideology and propaganda to inspirationally define a nation. How and why that happened – and what we can learn from it today – is the topic I pursue.

I’m joined by the social critic John McWhorter, author of the best-selling Woke Racism, who warns that woke activism can diminish the arts (go to 34:50). 

My other guests are the Mexican composer Ana Lara, the Revueltas scholars Roberto Kolb and Lorenzo Candelaria, the historian John Tutino, and PostClassical Ensemble conductor Angel Gil-Ordonez. I also sample President John F. Kennedy’s arts advocacy and ponder its pertinence (go to 31:50). 

For a fascinating comment on the caliber of Mexico’s political leadership in the thirties – President Lazaro Cardenes possessed a singular cultural/educational vision – go to 23:30. 

My final thoughts, at the end of the show: “I’m reminded that William Faulkner had something pretty harsh to say in 1958. Faulkner wrote: ‘The artist has no more actual place in the American culture of today that than he has in the American economy of today, no place at all in the warp and woof, the thews and sinews, the mosiac of the American dream.’ President Kennedy was responding to the estrangement of American artists like Faulkner . . . Do the American arts, can the arts inspire social justice – can they help refresh American identity? Will there by an American Diego Rivera? Can we hope for an American Silvestre Revueltas?” 

The show highlights a new PostClassical Ensemble Naxos CD – the world premiere recording of Revueltas’s complete soundtrack to the iconic film of the Mexican Revolution: Redes (1936), unforgettably shot by Paul Strand.

Revueltas – “Mexico’s most famous unknown composer” – figures prominently in my “new paradigm” for American classical music, explored in my new book Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music.

To see a PostClassical Ensemble documentary film about Revueltas and Redes, click here.

To purchase the new CD with the complete soundtrack, click here.

To purchase a Naxos DVD with the complete film, click here.

I am again indebted to 1A producer Rupert Allman and 1A host Jenn White for this generous allocation of time for an important and ambitious topic, and to my colleague Peter Bogdanoff for his invaluable technical assistance. 

The Russian Stravinsky

What happened to Stravinsky in the West? What to make of his “neo-classicism”? These are questions I’ve many times pondered in this space.

The superb Soviet-trained musicians who belatedly discovered Stravinsky’s post-Russian odyssey have certainly heard his music with different ears. The most extreme case I know is that of my great friend Alexander Toradze, for whom Stravinsky is at all times “Russian.” You can glean the same re-understanding from the Stravinsky performances of his longtime collaborator Valery Gergiev.

The latest evidence is the latest “PostClassical” webcast: an astounding performance of Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Winds with Toradze and PostClassical Ensemble conducted by Angel Gil-Ordóñez. Toradze’s extensive commentary takes issue with the composer’s own instructions. 

The many stories at hand include Lexo’s onstage meeting with Ella Fitzgerald in Portland, Oregon, in 1978, as a touring Soviet artist, and his stunning recollections of Stravinsky’s 1962 encounter with the legendary Soviet pianist Maria Yudina. He also shares his religious reading of the Piano Concerto’s slow movement as a “duality” of Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox influences.

Angel and I join Lexo alongside our usual host, the inimitable Bill McGlaughlin. Listen here.

For more Toradze — a fabulous film — click here.

LISTENING GUIDE:

5:00 – Stravinsky speaks: “music can express nothing” and cannot be “interpreted” – his neo-classical credo, formulated in Paris after World War I.

6:00 – A 1928 recording by Stravinsky and his son Soulima of Mozart’s C minor Fugue embodies the radically impersonal aesthetic Stravinsky now embraced; I call it “insolently impersonal.”

8:30 – Toradze remembers Stravinsky’s own performance of The Firebird in Moscow (1962) as “very uninteresting.” In his edition of Stravinsky’s Piano Sonata (published after the composer’s death), Soulima contradicted his father and embraced expressive “interpretation.” Toradze understands Stravinsky’s strictures against interpretation as a strategy for counteracting traditional piano styles rooted in Romantic repertoire (Liszt, Chopin, etc.). He recalls that, in Russia in 1962, Stravinsky testified that he always “dreamt in Russian.”

23:00 – We sample Stravinsky’s own 1968 recording of the Piano Concerto (with Philippe Entremont). Toradze finds the opening Largo too fast; he endorses the original tempo marking: “Largissimo.” He argues that composers are sometimes self-consciously constrained performing their own music, and cites Rachmaninoff as an example.

32:00 – Movement 1 of the Stravinsky Concerto, with Toradze and Angel Gil-Ordóñez is conducting PostClassical Ensemble (2011)

40:00 – The influence of jazz on Stravinsky and Toradze. During Toradze’s student years in Moscow, American jazz was “food for the soul”; it created the illusion “that’s what [American] freedom is about.” 

54:00 – In 1978, on tour in Portland, Oregon, Toradze met Ella Fitzgerald and told her (onstage) that she was “a goddess” in the Soviet Union.

57:00 – In Toradze’s religious reading of the second movement of the Stravinsky Concerto, a “duality” of Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox musical influences interact. Stravinsky, in France, believed his bleeding finger was cured by a religious miracle.

1:05 – Movement 2 of the Stravinsky Concerto, with Toradze and Gil-Ordóñez

1:20 – Movement 3 of the Stravinsky Concerto, with Toradze and Gil-Ordóñez

1:25 – Toradze remembers the Russian pianist Maria Yudina, “a colossal figure” who long championed Stravinsky in the USSR. She first heard the Stravinsky Concerto performed by Seymour Lipkin, Leonard Bernstein, and the NY Philharmonic on tour in Moscow in 1959. She met Stravinsky in Moscow in 1962 and was dismayed to discover him susceptible to “photo opportunities and journalists.” 

We close by sampling Yudina’s 1962 recording of the Stravinsky Concerto, conducted by Genadi Rozhdestvensky.

The Arts and Social Justice — Bedfellows?

Diego Rivera, Triumph of the Revolution (1926)

Today’s online edition of The American Purpose – an indispensable centrist voice pondering the contemporary condition of government, politics, and the arts – includes a piece of mine inviting dialogue on a topic people don’t dare talk about – the insistence that arts institutions necessarily serve as instruments for social justice. 

You can read the whole article here. What follow are excerpts:

I am thinking especially of the charitable foundations that have decided to stop funding the arts, or to only fund arts activities that explicitly promote diversity, equality, and justice. This is the reductionist notion that has steered philanthropic giving away from traditional “high culture.” . . .

But insisting that plays, paintings, and symphonies expressly serve social justice quite obviously risks marginalizing the arts by erasing part of what they stand for. . . . 

I have long been the recipient of communications from silenced voices – creative and performing artists who fear reprisal if they speak out loud:

“The foundations are pitting the arts community against itself.”

“Foundations today are behaving as blunt instruments . . . To me, the most profound fallacy is the notion that there’s not enough money to do both – to serve social justice concerns and to maintain contact with our past cultural pillars.”

“I believe the foundations are engaged in a form of blackmail. The way to get other people to even consider your point of view is not by legislating morality. It disrespects the power of religion, or of art — if you believe that art has the power to bring people together. In the case of evangelicals and today’s charitable foundations – they’re trying to alter the essential DNA of religion and of culture in order to prove ‘relevance.’” 

“We are in a period of calling out and shaming – and the foundations are following the activists. Of course, you have to start somewhere, and certainly this is a starting point that will see results. People understand that. But it’s my impression that we’ll move from the understandable to the upsetting pretty quickly. We all know we can’t go back to the way things were. That doesn’t mean we should burn everything down. We must move forward in a more enlightened way, with greater understanding of how our structures caused harm.” . . .

One version of the rejection of “high culture” goes like this: “The arts are thriving today in communities all across the United States. It all depends on where you look.” . . . This conviction observes a surging political art, passionately fixed on issues of diversity and inclusivity. But is this sufficient for art to “thrive”? . . .

Instead of the loaded high/low distinction, consider juxtaposing art that endures with art that proves transitory. To be sure, transitory art has its place. But cultural memory, when it sticks, is an indispensable source of ballast, whether personal, communal, or national. A crucial ingredient, increasingly elusive, is a usable past: roots in common. In fact, we can only escape the past – its sins and omissions – by embracing it. And this, traditionally, is a vital task for the creative artist in every field. It is part of what makes political art matter. . . .

Does art serve social justice? Does social justice serve art? My own impression is that much of what today passes for politically aroused art fails to transcend journalistic agitation. It does not linger in the mind and heart. It does not furnish the ballast associated with great literature and music, paintings and sculpture. That equation is traditional. It may also be indispensable. 

Dvorak’s Prophecy — A “Systematic Curatorial Effort”

The author most recently interviewed by Richard Aldous, in his always lively “Book Stack” series for The American Purpose, happens to be me, talking about Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music. You can hear our 30-minute chat here.

At one point, 22 minutes in, Richard in a surge of effusion pronounces: “Your time has come.” He references the new Philadelphia Orchestra recording of two Florence Price symphonies, and other evidence that American orchestras are finally attending to music forgotten and otherwise overlooked.

Not so fast, I reply. The rush to perform music by Black composers is more than welcome – but “we need a more systematic curatorial effort” based “on an informed overview.” In particular, I continue (casting further aspersion on Richard’s optimism), if American orchestras are to enjoy a “formidable future” they must once and for all embrace “our greatest composer” of concert music: Charles Edward Ives.

Ives, I opine, is not only a victim of a modernist “standard narrative” into which he does not fit; he is also an object of prejudice – that his music is “difficult.”

Of the six Dvorak’s Prophecy films just released by Naxos in tandem with my book, “Charles Ives’ America” is an impassioned act of advocacy. It maintains that Ives should become known as a member of the same supreme New World cultural pantheon as Walt Whitman and Herman Melville – and that, moreover, “he can become known.” His music is in fact “readily appreciable.” Here’s the trailer to the Ives film, with fabulous visual treatments by Peter Bogdanoff:

For more information on the Dvorak’s Prophecy films, click here.

John McWhorter on “Dvorak’s Prophecy”

In his New York Times column two days ago, John McWhorter wrote of Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music: “Horowitz has taught me a new way of processing the timeline of American classical music. . . . His lesson should resound.”

Attending Porgy and Bess at the Met, McWhorter continued, “I experienced the opera for the first time as an imperious touchstone rather than as a fascinating question. . . . Horowitz teaches us to stop hearing Porgy and Bess narrowly, as a Black opera, or as some sideline oddity called a folk opera. It is what opera should be in this country, with our history, period. Under this analysis, the scores to Copland’s Billy the Kid and Rodeo, for all their beauty, are the fascinating but sideline development, not Porgy and Bess.” 

I long ago discovered that an author cannot really control the content of a book. It will read differently for different readers. This is not only because different readers are people different from the author, but because the ways in which I may process and present information in a book are personal, erratic, at times incidental.

What most brought this home to me was my most extravagantly praised and reviled opus: Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music (1987). This was a very long book with many balls in the air, flying at different heights and velocities. Descriptions of what I had written, in the “good” reviews, sometimes surprised me as much as the assaults from musicians, music historians, and music lovers who mainly registered trampled turf or a defilement of acknowledged deities.

Most recently the author of Woke Racism, McWhorter is more a social critic than a music critic. But he knows music (his take on the notorious Heinrich Schenker controversy at the University of Texas is the most sensible I have read). In the case of my Dvorak book, he has swallowed and digested it whole, then applied its findings in one commanding gesture. His Times column registers what any author craves – understanding of a writer’s intentions so true that he can run with it. 

Here he is again:

“Porgy and Bess can feel, at times, messy. You never quite know what’s coming and might wonder whether it all hangs together. But that’s just it: Maybe as an American piece it shouldn’t hang together any more than America ever has. Horowitz cherishes this quality in what he regards as true American art in an eternally hybrid experiment of a nation, charting a commonality between the narratively baggy quality of Mark Twain’s greatest works and the splashy, smashed-up quality of so much of Charles Ives’s work, where despite the stringent classical structure overall, a folk tune can come crashing into the proceedings. Those who saw Copland as the real thing tended to find Ives’s work interesting but somewhat quaint and unfinished. But Horowitz points to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s thought that ‘in the mud and scum of things, there alway, alway something sings.’ That mud and scum, for Emerson, was what we now call authenticity.”

Yes, yes, and yes. I discard the modernist paradigm that assumes that nothing of real interest was composed by an American before 1915, that views Ives and Gershwin as gifted amateurs, that for decades patronized Porgy and Bess as if it were not an overwhelming cathartic experience (in a good production). 

In my book, I find Emersonian “mud and scum” not only in Ives (who himself cited this poem), but other self-made, “unfinished” American creators, including Whitman, Melville, and Twain. Emily Dickinson and William Faulkner (my favorite American novelist, who was no Henry James) also fit this list. And extolling the necessary pertinence of the Black vernacular to American creativity, to the perenialy unfinished project of national identity, I cite W. E. B. Du Bois and Ralph Ellison, William Levi Dawson and Toni Morrison.

I think it can be agreed that modernism is over – but the obituaries remain insufficiently framed. In the closing pages of Dvorak’s Prophecy, I write:

“The new American classical-music paradigm I have here proposed, reaching into the past, treats the twentieth century as an aberration in an Ur-narrative. The modernist juggernaut, whatever its triumphs, elevated art to lonely heights. It cherished highbrow pedigrees. It also punished the past. The triumphs remain. But the punishments, whether inflicted by Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis Mumford, or by Alfred Barr’s Museum of Modern Art, proved transient. It is time that the American musical pastlessness proclaimed by Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland, and Leonard Bernstein also be put to rest.” 

The revisionist reckoning I have attempted to apply to American classical music will doubtless resonate in other fields of American creative and intellectual endeavor. The rehabilitation of John Singer Sargent (for decades dismissed by modernists as a society painter) is a related phenomenon I could not resist inserting in Dvorak’s Prophecy. The historian Allen Guelzo – an appreciative reader of my book – adds: 

“The fate of American classical music has a definite parallel to American philosophy in the same period. The cognate to Dvorak and Dawson is the collegiate moral philosophy tradition and the idealist pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce and Josiah Royce. All of them were consigned to the same “pastlessness,” and a new philosophic narrative was created around William James and John Dewey in much the same way that a new musical narrative was confected by Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland.”

Did American philosophy begin with William James? Did American intellectual history slumber through the Gilded Age? Some people think so — still. 

For information on the six “Dvorak’s Prophecy” documentary films just released by Naxos, click here.

For readers who discover a paywall attempting to access John McWhorter, here’s part of what he wrote:

“Much of the history of classical music in America has been written as if indigenous American musical forms were ultimately insufficient to form the basis of mature art, such that Dvořák’s call fell largely upon deaf ears. . . . Joseph Horowitz writes in his new book, Dvořák’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music, that in the first half of the 20th century, a cadre of American composers created American classical music that either held Native American and Black music at an arm’s length or ignored it . . .

“Hence, the music of Aaron Copland, in works such as Appalachian Spring, is often treated as where American classical music went for real, with Porgy and Bess often treated as a zesty but idiosyncratic business created by an undertrained upstart. One can love Porgy and Bess deeply and yet fall for this perception . . . 

“No more: Horowitz has taught me a new way of processing the timeline of American classical music. If Dvořák’s counsel made sense — that is, if America is to develop a native classical music in the sense that a Bartók used Hungarian folk music to shape his work — then the through line runs directly through “Porgy and Bess.” Taking in the Metropolitan Opera’s fine production a few days ago, I experienced the opera for the first time as an imperious touchstone rather than as a fascinating question. . . .

“Porgy and Bess can feel, at times, messy. You never quite know what’s coming and might wonder whether it all hangs together. But that’s just it: Maybe as an American piece it shouldn’t hang together any more than America ever has. Horowitz cherishes this quality in what he regards as true American art in an eternally hybrid experiment of a nation, charting a commonality between the narratively baggy quality of Mark Twain’s greatest works and the splashy, smashed-up quality of so much of Charles Ives’s work, where despite the stringent classical structure overall, a folk tune can come crashing into the proceedings. Those who saw Copland as the real thing tended to find Ives’s work interesting but somewhat quaint and unfinished. But Horowitz points to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s thought that “in the mud and scum of things, there alway, alway something sings.” That mud and scum, for Emerson, was what we now call authenticity.

“Black composers, of course, created truly American classical music of this kind — William Dawson’s smashing Negro Folk Symphony is one example. Yet Porgy and Bess qualifies, despite its white creators, as a keystone of where truly American classical music had gone by its time, as well as one guide for where it should go. . . . 

“Horowitz teaches us to stop hearing Porgy and Bess narrowly, as a Black opera, or as some sideline oddity called a folk opera. It is what opera should be in this country, with our history, period. Under this analysis, the scores to Copland’s Billy the Kid and Rodeo, for all their beauty, are the fascinating but sideline development, not Porgy and Bess. Broadway pieces incorporating Black and immigrant musical styles that play plausibly in opera houses, like Kurt Weill and Langston Hughes’s Street Scene and Marc Blitzstein’s Regina, are less collectors’ oddities than pavers on the path to true American classical music, landing farther from the bull’s-eye than Porgy and Bess but worth attending to.

“Horowitz has taught me to listen to Black classical music as what the most American of classical music is. His lesson should resound.”

DVORAK’S PROPHECY on NPR — Are the Arts Still a “Fit Topic” for Historians?

At the conclusion of the National Public Radio feature I’ve produced about “The Fate of Black Classical Music,” Jenn White – who so graciously hosts the daily newsmagazine “1A” – asks me:

“In the Foreword to your new book Dvorak’s Prophecy, George Shirley – the first Black tenor to sing leading roles at the Met — writes: ‘Because of our current conversation about race, we now observe a seemingly desperate effort to make up for lost time, to present Black faces in the concert hall. But if it’s going to become a permanent new way of thinking, there has to be new understanding.’ What does he mean by that?”

I answer:

“George Shirley is 87 years old — he’s seen a lot. And as we’ve heard him say, he’s witnessed steps forward in race relations in America, and backward steps coming after those. When he talks about ‘a permanent new way of thinking,’ he means permanent change — not ephemeral change, as we’ve seen in the past. And he’s referencing what I call a ‘usable past’ – lasting cultural roots.

“You know, I went to a prestigious liberal arts college [it was Swarthmore]. I graduated a long time ago, in 1970. I majored in History. And in my four years there I never once heard the name  W. E. B. Du Bois. And I certainly did not read Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, which today I regard as pretty much obligatory reading for educated Americans. Du Bois, his book – they’re part of a usable American past, something we can all utilize as an anchor.

“George Shirley references ‘a seemingly desperate effort.’ What is this about? It says that we have to rethink the concert experience in our concert halls, on our campuses. We need to rethink the learning the experience. It’s not enough just to perform Black classical music. We should use the story of Du Bois, the story of Dvorak, the story of Harry Burleigh. We need to tell stories about the American past in order to anchor a constructive American future.”

It’s my good fortune to be creating 50-minute radio documentaries for Rupert Allman, the producer of “1A.” Rupert welcomes “deep dives” into timely topics. In the case of “The Fate of Black Classical Music” (which aired on Thanksgiving), the big picture – as in my book – has to do with prioritizing something in ever shorter supply in our United States: informed historical memory. A good chunk of our show is dedicated to an exchange with the historian Allen Guelzo, whose recent biography of Robert E. Lee is an exemplary instance of “using the past” with integrity and informed understanding. Guelzo is also the rare American historian who really knows the arts, including classical music. I asked him why American historians have failed to document Black classical music. He answered:

“Historians who write about music history are usually to be found in conservatories or in Music departments. But they’re not usually found in History departments. Now perhaps the reason for that is that the people who populate History departments simply don’t see the arts as part of their turf . . . And there is a certain professional segregation that goes on that way — which suggests, however faintly and however politely, that culture is not really a fit topic of interest for historians.”

Guelzo observes that “we don’t educate people in music the way we once did.” No Child Left Behind and STEM, he continues, “have been death for arts education, especially in music. . . . Nothing surprised me more in writing Robert E. Lee – A Life than tripping over the odd fact that when Lee was Superintendent of West Point, the faculty got together to play Schumann and Mendelssohn string quartets.”

A prominent recent history of the US – Jill Lepore’s wonderfully readable These Truths – delves deeply into issues that matter today, including slavery and race. But there isn’t a single sentence on the arts. I asked Guelzo what he made of that. He replied: 

“Part of it is the way historians are trained these days, in their graduate programs, which generally pay next to no attention to the arts. That was certainly my experience at the University of Pennsylvania. . . . Are we really adequately describing the lives that Americans have lived? . . . I think not. We’ve desperately shortchanged our understanding of the past.” 

Guelzo calls classical music a “foreign country” for those who write about the US. “If any thought is given to classical music at all, it’s as a social representation of elite class identity. And yet classical music is an enormously supple conveyer of social meaning.” 

And so it is with Black classical music, and with the American Dvorak. When Allen Guelzo says that William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony and George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess “prove that Dvorak was right” when he prophesied that “Negro melodies” would foster a “great and noble” school of American classical music, Guelzo means that these artworks absorb and dignify core aspects of the American experience, enduring American truths. I comment:

 “The story of Black classical music is both black and white. It includes W. E. B. Du Bois and William Dawson – and also Antonin Dvorak and George Gershwin. It also includes, in glorious fulfillment of Dvorak’s prophecy, Porgy and Bess – whose most fervent admirers included the members of the original 1935 cast. 

“In the wake of Gershwin’s sudden, shocking death in 1937, a memorial concert was held at the Hollywood Bowl. The participants included Ruby Elzy, a gifted Black soprano who sang Serena in the original Porgy production on Broadway. Elzy, too, would die young – of a botched operation. She had been planning to sing Verdi’s Aida – for a Black opera company. Ruby Elzy’s rendition of ‘My Man’s Gone Now,’ at the Gershwin Memorial Concert, is the most extraordinary performance I know of any selection from George Gershwin’s opera. The aria itself is steeped in the yearning of the sorrow songs. The performance combines the bluesy pathos of Billie Holliday with the operatic splendor of a young artist on the cusp of what would have become a notable career. It is Ruby Elzy’s keening lament for the departed composer.”

You can hear Ruby Elzy sing “My Man’s Gone Now” – and the rest of the NPR feature – here (scroll to the bottom of the page for a time-code and use your cursor to naviage). And here’s an outline of the show:

PART ONE: 

William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony (1934), why it matters, and why we don’t know it. With commentary by the late conductor Michael Morgan (8:00) and by Angel Gil-Ordóñez, who conducts the DC premiere this March with PostClassical Ensemble (9:00).

PART TWO:

George Shirley (12:05) remembers how Rudolf Bing desegregated the Metropolitan Opera. Allen Guelzo (18:00) ponders why American historians ignore the arts. Ruby Elzy sings “My Man’s Gone Now” (27:00).

PART THREE:

Excerpts (30:00) from PostClassical Ensemble’s Nov. 14 “narrative concert” – “The Souls of Black Folk” — at D.C.’s historic All Soul’s Church, with music by Harry Burleigh, Margaret Bonds, and Florence Price, plus readings from Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Margaret Bonds. The participants include students from Howard University, and the Chorale of the Coalition of African-Americans for the Performing Arts. The final work is Price’s Suite for Brasses and Piano(1949), in its first performance (by pianist Elizabeth Hill with members of PCE conducted by Angel Gil-Ordóñez) in more than half a century (40:00). 

–For more on PCE’s Black Classical Music Festival, click here.

–For more on my new book “Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music,” click here.

–For more on the six “Dvorak’s Prophecy” documentary films just released by Naxos, click here.

Dvorak’s Prophecy — A Two-Hour Webcast

My brand-new book Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music (already a best book of the year in The Financial Times and Kirkus Reviews) proposes a “new paradigm” for the history of American classical music. 

Replacing the modernist “standard narrative” popularized by Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, it begins not ca. 1920 but with the sorrow songs so memorably extolled by W E. B. Du Bois and Antonin Dvorak. Emphasizing proximity to vernacular speech and song, it privileges Charles Ives and George Gershwin as our two great creative talents. And it necessarily incorporates the Black Classical Music now being belatedly exhumed.

In effect, I am presenting a buried lineage, beginning with the American Dvorak and proceeding to Harry Burleigh, Nathaniel Dett, William Levi Dawson, Florence Price, William Grant Still – all of whom absorbed Dvorak’s roots-in-the-soil Romantic cultural nationalism. The peak achievements here include (I would say) Burleigh’s “Steal Away” and (setting Langston Hughes) “Lovely Dark and Lonely One,” Dett’s The Ordering of Moses, and Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony.

Another way of looking at it all is to fix on the composers left out of the standard narrative – the American Dvorak, Burleigh, Ives, Gershwin, Dawson – and also, e.g.,  Silvestre Revueltas, Bernard Herrmann, and Lou Harrison. (My series of “Dvorak’s Prophecies” films, just now released on Naxos, includes treatments of Ives, Dawson, Herrmann, and Harrison.)

These eight “left out” composers have long been explored and promoted by PostClassical Ensemble and my PCE colleague Angel Gil-Ordonez – and the most recent “PostClassical” webcast, on WWFM, is dedicated to Dvorak’s Prophecy and compositions by these eight formidable American voices. In conversation with Angel and the inimitable Bill McGlaughlin, we ask and re-ask: “How is it possible these pieces aren’t known?” Angel calls the American neglect of Ives “the biggest mystery in American music.” I comment that Revueltas is “the composer we should be studying right now” – because he knows how to embed the call for social justice into enduring works of art.

Basically, American classical musicians have lacked curiosity about American music; they remain fundamentally Eurocentric. In my book, I treat this as a larger American self-affliction; the epigraph quotes George Santayana: “The American mind does not oppose tradition it forgets it.”

And this matters more than ever. Never before have we so urgently needed a common cultural inheritance to foster a newly consolidated national self-awareness. 

This is a need so acute that it isn’t noticed or discussed.  

Here (below) is a Listeners Guide for our three-part WWFM webcast. Profuse thanks, as ever, to David Osenberg, who makes WWFM the nation’s most enterprising classical-music radio station.

For information on the book and the films: www.josephhorowitz.com

COMING UP: “DVORAK’S PROPHECY ON NPR: “1A” Thursday, Nov 25 at 10 am ET.

PART ONE:

00:00 – Harry Burleigh: Steal Away (Kevin Deas and Joe Horowitz at the National Cathedral)

7:00 – Burleigh as a forgotten hero of American music. His place in the new narrative proposed by Horowitz in Dvorak’s Prophecy, replacing the modernist “standard narrative” of American classical music 

15:00 – Antonin Dvorak’s little-known “American” style after the New World Symphony. His American Suite, movement 3, performed by PostClassical Ensemble and Angel Gil-Ordóñez, for whom it proclaims “This is America!”

23:00 – Dvorak’s three American tropes: African-American, Native American, the American West. How to account for our continued ignorance of his later American output? Horowitz: “We’re just not interested in ourselves, we lack curiosity.” The Metropolitan Museum traces a lineage of American painting; the NY Philharmonic does not trace a lineage of American music.

29:00 – The “most striking omission”: Charles Ives. Gil-Ordóñez: the failure to play Ives is “the biggest mystery” in American music, “really a tragedy.”

36:00 – Ives: The Housatonic at Stockbridge (as presented in the new “Dvorak’s Prophecy” film “Charles Ives’ America”)

PART TWO:

00:00 – George Gershwin and “the Gershwin threat.” An under-rated Gershwin piece: the Cuban Overture, with its surprising Andalusian episode

2:08 – Gershwin Cuban Overture, performed by Angel Gil-Ordóñez and PCE

14:08 – Why don’t we know the Cuban Overture? It fails the criteria of modernism

18:55 – William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony: “buried treasure”

20:26 – Dawson’s symphony, movement 2: “Hope in the Night,” performed by Leopold Stokowski

41:00 – Could the Black musical motherlode that fostered popular genres have equally served American classical music?

PART THREE: 

2:00 – Silvestre Revueltas: another major composer who falls outside the modernist narrative. Gil-Ordóñez: “another tragedy.”

8:15 – Revueltas: Redes (ending), with PCE conducted by Angel Gil-Ordóñez

11:52 – Why Revueltas is “the composer we should be studying right now” re: political art and social justice.

22:00 – Lou Harrison and his Violin Concerto

25:00 – Harrison Violin Concerto, movement 3, with Tim Fain and PCE led by Gil-Ordóñez

35:25 – Bernard Herrmann as “the most under-rated 20th century American composer”

38:00 – Herrmann’s Psycho Narrative performed by PCE and Gil-Ordóñez

Dvorak’s Prophecy, the CIA, and More

My two-hour conversation with Kirill Gerstein, who hosts an indispensable weekly “webinar” dealing with musical issues, mainly focused on my new book Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music.

But – as in my book (yesterday named one of the best of the year in The Financial Times) – many other topics were broached.

If you’re interested in sampling our exchange, here’s a handy Listener’s Guide:

8:00 – The saga of Aaron Copland as a parable about the fate of the American artist. 

12:00 – Dvorak’s American legacy and Black Classical Music.

20:00 – Dvorak’s bluesy American style in the American Suite and Humoresques

28:00 – George Gershwin as the great hope of 20th century American classical music. “The Gershwin threat” of the interwar decades. “The Gershwin Moment” today. 

38:00 – What to do right now? Curate the American past. How art museums get it right.

40:00 – Arthur Judson vs. Otto Klemperer and Dmitri Mitropoulos: how a “salesman of great music” displaced forward-thinking conductors as an arbiter of taste. 

46:00 – Why American orchestras need scholars on staff. The critical lack of “symphonic Dramaturgs.”

54:00 – The debate over “cultural appropriation” and how it penalizes composers of consequence.

58:00 – Today’s big find in Black Classical Music: William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony.

1:06 – A huge topic: Charles Ives as a victim of the modernist “Standard Narrative.” Why his music must become better known. The Housatonic at Stockbridge.

1:16 – The comparable neglect of Mexico’s Silvestre Revueltas.

1:23 – The CIA, the cultural Cold War, and the modernist Standard Narrative – a glimpse at my forthcoming book The Propaganda of Freedom: JFK, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and the Cultural Cold Warrior [Nicolas Nabokov]

1:30 – Why the US Government needs to play a bigger and more proactive role in support of the arts. How Richard Goodwin nearly became an influential arts advisor to JFK. 

1:34 – The erasure of the arts from the American experience. We forget how much the arts once mattered more, as in the Gilded Age. 

My thanks to Kirill. 

Dvorak’s Prophecy — Online Wednesday

It’s my pleasure to be Kirill Gerstein’s guest this Wednesday for his “Kronberg Academy” online seminar – that’s at noon ET and you can register here.

To my knowledge, this series is unique. It dives deeply – for two hours – into musical topics. It attracts a distinguished international audience. I will be discussing my new book Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music, and also sampling the companion Dvorak’s Prophecy films I’ve produced for Naxos in collaboration with PostClassical Ensemble. 

As many of you will know, Kirill Gerstein is a probing concert pianist with extensive jazz training – someone who performs the Gershwin concerto with improvised passagework. The example of Dvorak’s bluesy American piano style, in such little-known works as the F major Humoresque and American Suite, will be a topic of special interest. 

We’ll also be talking about Aaron Copland and the Red Scare, about Charles Ives and Transcendentalism, and about the recovery of an amazing specimen of “Black Classical Music” – William Levi Dawson’s oracular Negro Folk Symphony.