Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 3

Bernstein, Balanchine, Ellington and the Waning of “Soft Power”

Kabalevsky contratulates Bernstein

Today’s online Persuasion/The American Purpose runs an essay of mine building on the growing awareness that “soft power” diplomacy, long vital to American foreign policy, seems suddenly in abeyance. Referencing the three most potent cultural ambassadors to the USSR during the Cold War, I write in part: 

If American diplomacy cannot today deploy a Leonard Bernstein, George Balanchine, or Duke Ellington, it is not merely because soft diplomacy is waning. With cultural consensus shattering, with cultural memory eroding, such creative artists—not ephemeral epiphenomena, but icons carved deep into the American experience—do not exist any longer. . . . 

Who, today, embodies “America” in the performing arts? Certainly no symphonic conductor, choreographer, or composer. President Trump, appointing himself chairman of the Kennedy Center, drops names like Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson, Elvis Presley. He mentions Phantom of the Opera, Cats, and Les Misérables. Others might nominate Taylor Swift or Beyoncé. Who is to say what best represents the American arts right now?

Notions of individual freedom, however incompletely fulfilled, once grounded an historic American experiment in governance. Freedom and democracy forged a mainstream ideal. They limned . . . “the soul of a nation, making it possible for friends and adversaries alike to see what makes a country tick.”

No longer. We cannot even agree on facts, on standards, and sources of truth. The present debate over whether the Voice of America is “balanced” and “objective” becomes futile in the absence of a mainstream “factual” narrative about Palestinians and Israelis. In education, is there any feasible consensus about how Columbia University, now penalized by the president, handled “free speech”? Does the Kennedy Center, chaired by the president, over-emphasize diversity, equality, and inclusivity? Many in the American arts privately agree that DEI has done more harm than good.

Viewed from the left, the American experience is overshadowed by the slave trade and the Indian Wars—and a soft criterion of virtue is applied. Viewed from the right, the criterion is hard and emphasizes power regained. Ideals of freedom—once embodied and shared by Leonard Bernstein, George Balanchine, and Duke Ellington—sit uneasily in the back seat of this debate. And so, in the end, does soft diplomacy.

“An Urgent Priority” — R. I. P.: NEH (1965-2025) — A Postscript

Here’s a postscript to my obituary for the National Endowment of the Humanities, and for my own Music Unwound national consortium:

I am now apprised – via a form letter — that the cancellation of Music Unwound (a 15-year-old national consortium of orchestras and universities) “represents an urgent priority for the administration.” 

Music Unwound has also been terminated “to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities.” 

“The NEH “is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda. The President’s February 19, 2025, executive order mandates that the NEH eliminate all non-statutorily required activities and functions.”

Hence: no role for Congress here.

The letter is signed by Michael McDonald, Acting Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities.

Schubert and the Music of Exhaustion

The supreme string quartet, for me, has long been Schubert’s last, in G major — memorably performed last Friday night by the Danish Quartet at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall. 

As one of the quartet’s violinists, Rune Tonsgaard Sorensen, was on parental leave, his place was taken by Yura Lee – introduced by violist Asbjorn Norgaard as a Korean-American musician from Los Angeles. Norgaard also pointed out that the group’s cellist, Fredrik Schoyen Sjolin,  happens to be not Danish, but Norwegian. He was making a point about music, the arts, and mutual understanding. The audience responded with a sustained ovation: a sign of the times.

In fact, the quality of attention throughout (the program also included a new work by Bent Sorensen inspired by the Schubert G major) was extraordinary. Experiencing this concert at this unhinged moment in our American odyssey nearly felt defiant. “A breath of fresh air” would be an under-statement. It was more like finding refuge in an oxygen tent.

Most of all, there was Schubert. Composed in 1826, his G major quartet wasn’t premiered until 1850 – 22 years after Schubert’s death – and first published somewhat later. Even today, it’s not much programmed. The most obvious reason is stamina. A performance can last nearly an hour. And the last movement, the most grueling of Schubert’s perpetual motion finales, is relentless. If ever a string quartet took no prisoners, it’s the Schubert G major.

Exhaustion is here an actual motif. You can’t listen to the slashing accents and hurtling velocity without absorbing the physical demands being inflicted on the performers. 

Exhaustion is differently evoked by the quartet’s most unforgettable, most original inspiration. In a sonata form, the recapitulation – bringing back the opening material – is typically a refulgent moment. In the first movement of the Schubert G major, it’s a moment of fatigue and decomposition. The entire movement is a kaleidoscope of heaving chordal formations, dancing lyric effusions, and – most magically – anticipatory whiffs of Bruckner’s existential tremolos. So by the time the recapitulation occurs, all energy is spent: the opening gestures here fall limp. Schubert’s pianissimo residue uncannily calibrates the exertion and argumentative density of everything that has gone before.

Through my wife Agnes, I enjoy a sporadic acquaintance with the violinist Gidon Kremer – who participated in a tremendous Schubert G major performance decades ago at New York’s 92nd Street Y. (The other players were Daniel Philips, Yo-Yo Ma, and Kim Kashkashian.) That performance was released as a recording – can hear it here. Not long after the LP came out, Gidon happened to visit and asked to hear a portion of the first movement. What he wanted to know was whether the exposition repeat (which I dimly recall had not been performed) was inserted in the studio. It was – and Gidon needed to hear nothing more.

I have no strong feelings, in general, about exposition repeats. As often as not, I can do without them. But in the Schubert G major the first movement exposition repeat is vital – only then can Schubert’s exhaustion fully register. It’s an exhaustion that (as in Mahler) inspires fresh spiritual energies. The remainder of the movement is shaded by a newly acquired lyric pathos. Schubert tenderly smooths what had been the tremolo theme. (His sonata-form recapitulations can be surprisingly literal – but not here.) But the wrestling between major and minor modes remains pervasive – and will continue, relentlessly, in the movements to come.

No other composer understood exhaustion as Schubert did. I am thinking especially (of course) of the desperately fraught quietude of his song cycle Winterreise (which I have performed and also written about in this space) – ultimately, a glimpse of existential desolation whose finality somehow consoles. And there are Schubert’s other perpetual motion machines, whose inexhaustion registers terrifying impersonal energies. Of the plunging chromatic scales streaking the finale of the C minor Piano Sonata, Claudio Arrau (in my book Conversations with Arrau) discovered “something skeletal, macabre – without any flesh. Really the work of death.” And there is the Andante of Schubert’s Ninth Symphony, whose dire central juggernaut hurtles toward an abyss. 

Anyway, the Danish Quartet omitted that exposition repeat. So their terrific reading of the first movement was shortchanged. Otherwise, I marveled at the quartet’s intensity of understanding. It was a highly personal interpretation – the opening tremolo theme, with its Brucknerian amplitude, was daringly slow — that at no point felt self-conscious. I could not help focusing on Fredrik Schoyen Sjolin, a cellist of exceptional subtlety who reminded me that Schubert has here gifted the cello the quartet’s peak lyric inspirations (in movements two and three both).

The players took a deep collective breath before launching the finale – the heaving triple-forte climax of which (Schubert could have marked four fortes, five fortes) summoned a sonorous anguish exceeding every previous expressive peak.

                                    ***

Further thoughts on the music of exhaustion:

In Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, a perpetual-motion finale tests human stamina. In Schubert, with his “heavenly length,” perpetual-motion (as a music historian of my acquaintance once misguidedly argued) invariably persists “too long”: the stamina is inhuman.

Mahler’s morendo endings to his Ninth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde marry physical exhaustion to spiritual enlightenment. Gradually dissipated energy levitates the endings of  Schubert’s Piano Sonatas in D major and G major.

Wagner twice calibrated to exhaust his tenor – in the final acts of Tannhauser and Tristan und Isolde. A fresh-voiced tenorial rendering of either of these two acts (readily possible on recordings) is a false rendering. In a famous (to Wagnerites) exchange of letters, the composer implores his best tenor, the imperious Albert Niemann, not to abridge the finale of Tannhauser act two. So as to conserve his voice for the third and final act, Niemann insists on cutting an outburst — “Erbarm dich mein, der, ach! so tief in Sünden” — which Wagner (correctly) deems essential. Wagner wants Niemann to understand that Tannhauser needs to sound vocally exhausted in act three: “Once more: — sing the second finale as if you were to end the evening with it – and rest assured — only then will you sing the third act entirely to my liking. In a word: I find you far too fresh in the third act, too physically powerful, and I have waited in vain so far for the nuances that I demand. . . . Everything here is calculated to produce a ghostly tonelessness which gradually rises to the level of a touching tenderness, but no further. There is too much physical strength in your rendering of the [act three] narration up to your arrival in Rome: that is not how a man would speak who had just been roused from madness to a few minutes lucidity, a being from whom others shy away when they meet him, who for months has gone almost entirely without food, and whose life is sustained only by the glimmer of an insane desire.”

This desperate advice is not irrelevant to the Schubert G major String Quartet.

For a blog on Schubert and Alfred Brendel, click here.

R. I. P. : The National Endowment for the Humanities (1965-2025)

Since 2010 I have administered Music Unwound, a national consortium of orchestras and educational institutions funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. I assume that Music Unwound no longer exists – nor does more than $150,000 in Congressionally approved MU funding as yet unspent. To my knowledge, there has been no formal notification. The forces in play are arbitrary and anonymous. It feels different than being cancelled by an adversary with a face. It feels more ominous.

Music Unwound created cross-disciplinary festivals, linked to high schools, colleges, and universities, in ten states in every part of the US. The recipients ranged in size from the New Hampshire Music Festival to Indiana University/Bloomington. The topics were themes and events in American history. We aspired to explore an expanded mission for American orchestras, and also fresh ways of presenting music in performance. 

Though I cannot pretend that every MU festival was a complete success (we were attempting something untested), it was not unusual to hear audience members (the NEH required post-concert conversations) testify: “That was the most memorable concert I have ever attended.”

I would say the most sustained, most striking successes were in El Paso, Texas, and in the state of South Dakota. In El Paso I was privileged to work with a visionary educator: Lorenzo (“Frank”) Candelaria, at that time Associate Provost of the University of Texas/El Paso (UTEP) and also a proactive member of the El Paso Symphony board. Thousands of UTEP students attended El Paso Symphony concerts (with their parents and siblings) for the first time. Practically all were Mexican-American. Most were the first in their families to attend college. They were the hungriest, least entitled students I have ever encountered. The topics in play included the cultural efflorescence galvanized by the Mexican Revolution – and Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo were new names to most. Another MU festival dealt with Kurt Weill as an exemplary American immigrant. I have many times, in this space, recounted the personal impact of these events on UTEP students. (I append some evidence below.)

In South Dakota, where the impact of Music Unwound is ongoing and ever expanding, I was again fortunate to encounter a visionary cultural leader onsite: Delta David Gier, the Music Director of the South Dakota Symphony. His concerts were already humanities-infused. The MU alliance took that a step further, and also linked SDSO subscription concerts to Sioux Falls high schools, and to universities across the state (which bus students to SDSO concerts up to an hour away).

I have documented the South Dakota impact in a couple of NPR “More than Music” radio documentaries (ALSO funded by Music Unwound): “Shostakovich in South Dakota” and “What’s an Orchestra For?” You can hear the testimony for yourself (or read excerpts below). 

And you can sample a typical South Dakota Music Unwound concert, “Copland and Mexico,” here. The remarkdable visual track is by my longtime colleague Peter Bogdanoff, the host is South Dakota Symphony conductor Delta David Gier, the actor is Frank Candelaria. (The same program, introducing the master Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas, was presented by the El Paso Symphony, the Austin Symphony, the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Las Vegas Philharmonic, the Louisville Orchestra, the North Carolina Symphony, and the Brevard Music Festival [most recently lead partner in the MU consortium].)

South Dakota is a red state. Its former governor is now Secretary of Homeland Security. Its Senator John Thune is the Senate Majority Leader. An extensive profile of Senator Thune in the current New Yorker reminds me of South Dakotans I know: courteous, quietly aspirant. I read that he prefers to work behind the scenes. 

I fervently hope he is doing so.

                                    ***

I append below some excerpts from previous blogs — here and here — describing humanities-infused festivals in South Dakota and El Paso:

For Mark Bertrand, the pastor of Sioux Falls’ Grace Presbyterian Church, the [contextualized] South Dakota Symphony performance of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony [bearing witness to the Nazi siege of Leningrad] evoked the resilience of Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invading army in 2023. Absorbing the inspirational impact of the symphony on the beleaguered city, Bertrand also found himself thinking about the role of culture in a nation’s life. “We don’t value things the way they did. It really gets you thinking about how different their values must have been.”. . .  As Shostakovich’s symphony began its slow, inexorable ascent toward a final climax, Bertrand found himself remembering a German soldier whose words were quoted earlier in the evening. The Russians not only broadcast the Leningrad Symphony throughout the Soviet Union. They managed to broadcast it via loudspeakers to the Nazi troops blockading Leningrad. After the war, a German soldier testified: “It had a slow but powerful effect on us. The realization began to dawn that we would never take Leningrad. We began to see that there was something stronger than starvation, fear and weather – the will to remain human.” 

The South Dakota Symphony’s performance of the Leningrad Symphony was elaborately partnered by South Dakota State University. Reflecting on dropping enrollments in the Humanities, David Reynolds, director SDSU’s the School of Performing Arts, says: “I realize that in some high school curricula today the story of World War II may be only a week. I think that finding a way to use the performing arts to bring this kind of story to life is a wonderful opportunity to touch students who are growing up with social media and other non-traditional resources. Students in our Music Appreciation classes – those are the folks that one of these days will be bank presidents, school board presidents, and will decide the role of the arts in public and private schools. It’s very important for them to have experiences just like this one – Shostakovich and the siege of Leningrad. To get them thinking that life would be incomplete without the arts being a part of it.”             

In another “Music Unwound” program, I quote Dakota State University student Nora Zoller, responding to an SDSO festival that brought former US Ambassador John Beyrle to Madison, South Dakota (population 5,000). She was able to chat with him over dinner on campus. She told me she was profoundly inspired by his optimism about “how to handle uncertainty and what it means to be OK in the face of adversity.”

On the same NEH-funded NPR program, David Earnest, a political scientist at South Dakota State University, pondered the receptivity of SDSU students to SDSO festivals. A relative newcomer to South Dakota, he cited a culture of courtesy, a “frontier mentality” of helping one another, and a humility about the wide world. “I think those attributes really commend our students to opening up to new opportunities and ideas.” 

In El Paso, one of our MU festivals, “Kurt Weill and America,” included five concerts, three master classes, seven classroom presentations, and a visit to a semi-rural high school. The first undergraduate UTEP class I visited was Selfa Chew’s “Afro-Mexican History.” She is herself Mexican/Chinese/Japanese, an authority on the fate of Japanese Mexicans during World War II. I told Weill’s story: a Jewish cantor’s son, born in 1900, he was the foremost German operatic composer of his generation. He fled Hitler and wound up in New York, where he re-invented himself as a leading Broadway composer before dying young in 1950. Weill considered himself an American from day one. He did not wish to consort with other German immigrants. He told Time Magazine: “Americans seem to be ashamed to appreciate things here. I’m not.”

The immediacy with which Professor Chew’s students engaged with this story was electrifying. One student asked with a trembling voice: how was Weill able to do it? She missed Mexico. . . .  On Friday afternoon a UTEP Music “convocation” featured the El Paso Symphony’s exceptional guest soloists – William Sharp and Lisa Vroman – singing Weill. Bill sang “The Dirge for Two Veterans,” a patriotic setting of Walt Whitman in response to Pearl Harbor. I introduced this performance by screening FDR’s “day of infamy” speech, declaring war on Japan. Brian Yothers, from UTEP’s English faculty, gave a 10-minute talk on Whitman and why Weill would have found this iconic American a kindred spirit. Two UTEP vocalists sang “How Can You Tell an American?,” composed by Weill three years into his American period. The students keenly appreciated the song’s answer: you can’t tell Americans what to do. When our 80 minutes expired, no one got up to leave. 

The festival’s central event was an El Paso Symphony subscription concert, given twice. The first half explored Weill in Europe; the main work was the Weill/Brecht Seven Deadly Sins (1933). Part two was Weill in America: the four Walt Whitman songs; a Broadway medley to close. This was music as sanguine as Weill/Brecht is cheeky. What was Weill about? We posed the question with a scripted exegesis and a continuous visual track by Peter Bogdanoff.

After that came “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” – a joint presentation of UTEP’s Opera and Theatre programs. Cherry Duke, director of Opera UTEP, wrote in a program note: “With the prevalence of division, xenophobia and fear in today’s news, I was struck by similar themes in many of Weill’s works. He seems to ask the question: Who exactly is the stranger, the outsider, the exile?” Weill’s songs, and a chunk of his 1946 Broadway opera Street Scene, were interspersed with excerpts from Brecht’s Mother Courage, and from the 1929 Elmer Rice play upon which Street Scene the opera was based. These juxtapositions registered powerfully. Even more powerful was a recitation of a 1935 poem by Langston Hughes, who collaborated with Weill on Street Scene. It began: “Let America be America again./Let it be the dream it used to be.”

The quarterback for the El Paso Weill festival was Frank Candelaria, who as Associate Provost at UTEP has the vision and persistence to make big things happen. Frank is an El Paso native, the first member of his family to obtain what is called “higher education” — Oberlin and Yale. He left a tenured position at UT/Austin to return to El Paso five years ago. He expected the Weill festival to catch fire in El Paso, but the intimacy with which it penetrated personal lives took him by surprise. On the final day he said to me: “I learned a lot about my own city and how strongly people identify as Americans.”

Which brings me to a final vignette. Once again a visit to Eastlake High School proved a humbling experience. It serves a semi-rural “colonia.” Of the school’s 2,200 predominantly Hispanic students, 69 per cent are “economically disadvantaged.” Frank and I visited Eastlake last year for “Copland and Mexico.” Again some 300 students were taken out of their classes for an hour-long assembly. When I entered the auditorium I was applauded – I was remembered. I spoke about Kurt Weill and immigration, I shared my clip of FDR declaring war, I played a recording of “Dirge for Two Veterans.” A girl raised her hand to tell us that she had wept twice during the song – the parts where Whitman and Weill describe moonlight overlooking the twin graves of the two Civil War soldiers, a father and son. Then I played a Frank Sinatra recording of “September Song,” after which the students requested another one. So I played Sinatra singing “Speak Low.”

Afterward, the East Lake Chorus asked to sing for me. They chose the “Star-Spangled Banner.”

What’s an Orchestra For? — and The Crisis in “Soft Power” Diplomacy

A montage from Peter Bogdanoff’s continuous visual track for the SDSO “New World Encounters” concert

Addressing high school students in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, a few weeks ago, former US Ambassador to Russia John Beyrle said that the US State Department faces “an existential crisis.”

Speaking on my latest NPR “More than Music” feature, “What’s an Orchestra For?,” he further comments: “Soft power” – the use of music and education as an instrument of foreign policy – “still exists. The question is whether we as a country understand that it, too, makes America great. And I am afraid that President Trump does not understand that well enough, that his view of the world is ‘might makes right.’ I think that’s a potentially cataclysmic mistake. I fear that we will compromise our ability to influence other countries, to pursue interests that dovetail with our own national interests.” Beyrle also described a destructive “climate of fear” within the government. You can hear it all here.

Ambassador Beyrle was visiting South Dakota for a week-long “New World Encounters” festival exploring jazz as an instrument of cultural diplomacy. The participants included the ebullient French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, who delivered a lecture/recital on “Ravel and Jazz” at three universities two hours apart. The culminating orchestral concert included narration and a continuous visual track. My radio program showcases the SDSO festival (part of the NEH-funded “Music Unwound” consortium that I direct) as an exemplary exercise in how orchestras can (and should) proactively foster mutual understanding throughout a community of patrons and students. 

SDSO Music Director Delta David Gier, who personally superintends the orchestra’s thematic festivals, says that his profession is undergoing an overdue “metamorphosis” — that the template of the “jet-setting maestro,” with multiple jobs and no genuine home base, is receding. On NPR, I comment:

“The British music critic Richard Morrison, in a recent piece for BBC Music Magazine, wrote: ‘The age of the jet-setting maestro is over, or should be – for environmental, financial, social and indeed musical reasons.’ Morrison was responding to the Chicago Symphony’s choice for its next music director: Klaus Makela, who is not yet 30 years old and will concurrently take over Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra. A veteran music critic of my acquaintance called that “the stupidest decision” he’d seen in decades on the job. 

I continue: “The template in question – now a dysfunction crippling classical music internationally – originated with the late Ronald Wilford of Columbia Artists Management. Wilford realized he could maximize the income and prestige of his marquis conductors by stationing them on multiple podiums, preferably an ocean apart. This strategy was commercial – it had nothing to do with making better music. In Chicago itself, the orchestra’s first two, formative music directors – Theodore Thomas and Frederick Stock – were civic fixtures whose combined tenure lasted half a century. Concurrently, Boston’s Serge Koussevitzky and Philadelphia’s Leopold Stokowski famously pushed the artistic envelope. It would never remotely have occurred to any of them to seek additional employment elsewhere.” 

In addition to Beyrle, Bavouzet, and Gier, participants in the NPR show include composer John Luther Adams (whose An Atlas of Deep Time was premiered and recorded by the SDSO), and faculty members and students from South Dakota State University (Brookings, SD), Dakota State University (Madison, SD), and Lincoln High School (Sioux Falls, SD). 

For me – and I’m sure for many others – what most lingered afterward wasn’t an idea, or an apprehension, but Bavouzet’s sublime performance of the slow movement of Ravel’s Concerto in G – music that exemplifies how beauty is a fleeting experience somehow sad but consoling. It ends the broadcast.

LISTENING GUIDE

4:10 — Ambassador John Beyrle addresses high school students: the Voice of America in Soviet Russia

8:50 — Ambassador Beyrle addresses university students: an “existential crisis” at the US State Department

14:00 — SDSO Music Director Delta David Gier on the importance of moving to Sioux Falls

16:00 — “The age of the jet-set maestro is over — or should be.”

18:15 — Composer John Luther Adams on the South Dakota Symphony

19:25 — A Sioux Falls high school orchestra plays Dvorak

22:45 — Dakota State University sophomore Nora Zoller on the importance of arts education

32:00 — Ambassador Beyrle reflects on “might makes right” diplomacy — a “cataclysmic mistake”

39:15 — An under-reported story: the major US charitable foundations have given up on orchestras

41:00 — Jean-Efflam Bavouzet talks about and performs the sublime slow movement of Ravel’s concerto in G

Three of my most popular (and still resilient) blogs address the jetset conductor:

What’s an Orchestra For? — Mulling Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Resignation from the San Francisco Symphony

The Chicago Symphony Lands Klaus Makela

“Ripeness Is All” — Is the South Dakota Symphony’s Mahler Really Better than Klaus Makela and the Oslo Phil?

Finding a Mahler Message for Today

My review of Karol Berger’s Mahler’s Symphonic World: Music for the Age of Uncertainty – “Finding a Mahler Message for Today” – was today published online by The American Scholar. You can read it here.

One starting point of Berger’s terrific new book is Theodor Adorno’s 1960 contention that Mahler’s gift was essentially pessimistic, that he did not succeed as an ostensible “yea-sayer.” Adorno was a frequent windbag. Berger, in rigorous disagreement, never obfuscates or fudges. He takes topics elsewhere a muddle and keenly finishes them off. I am thinking especially of his treatment of Mahler’s two most memorable leavetakings: the “Abschied” (“Farewell”) concluding Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth, 1909) and the Adagio finale of the Ninth Symphony (1910). Both vanish to wisps of tone. 

Are these kindred versions of a sublime dissolution of the ego? Berger’s meticulous answer, bearing on Mahler’s state of mind in the wake of personal travail, is: not really. The ending of Das Lied admits no redemptive afflatus, no serene personal afterlife, no transcendental realm. Berger memorably writes: 

“[Das Lied von der Erde] celebrates the earth but from the perspective of someone who knows that he is only a temporary guest on it and that he is about to take his leave. . . . Uniquely in Mahler’s oeuvre, no consoling vision of a transcendent beyond is on offer here: death is death and there is no hereafter to recompense us for its finality. The only consolation is that the earth will go on, forever renewing itself and offering its life, love, and beauty to others.” 

This close consideration of Mahler’s serene submission to nature yields a personal note that feels exigent right now, with the world more distressed than at any point in Mahler’s lifetime. “We take it for granted that the earth is filled with so much beauty. We shouldn’t. Beauty is not like air or water, absolutely indispensable for our existence and survival. Humanity would have survived on a planet deprived of beauty. Beauty is something optional.” So Mahler, in Berger’s reading, is saying to us: “For me, this beauty [is] a gratuitous and welcome gift. And for this very reason, it seems a promise that the earth is not necessarily hostile, that it might potentially be a suitable, hospitable, delightful place for me and beings like me. When the time comes, I shall take leave of it with regret but also with gratitude.” 

My review eventually digresses to ponder “Mahler and Schubert.” Of Mahler’s scherzos, Berger writes: “Invariably, these are marked by moments when the exuberance . . . threatens to become uncontrolled, sliding into something frightening and ghostly.” They are caught in an “inexorable temporal stream.” Berger adds: “Mahler must have been the first composer to attempt to capture in his music . . . the absurdity of existence.” But surely the first composer to do that was Franz Schubert. His “Die Krähe,” in the song cycle Winterreise, limns an unsettling and hallucinatory intimacy between a man existentially adrift and – his sole faithful companion—an ominous black bird. The cycle ends with a barefoot hurdy-gurdy man in the snow attended only by growling dogs. And in the second movement of Schubert’s Ninth, an “inexorable” march, “ceaselessly in motion,” becomes a juggernaut halting at the cusp of a cataclysm. Arthur Farwell’s scrupulous review of Mahler’s 1910 New York Philharmonic performance of Schubert’s Ninth – a document I have quoted half a dozen times in my books – here says it all.  

That the Mahler template is already nascent in Schubert’s Ninth was brought home to me decades ago, because my main experience of the symphonies of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert has always been at the piano, playing four-hand keyboard reductions.  Only one of those symphonies could possibly work in concert as a piano duet: Schubert’s Ninth, the knitted textures of which are so pervasive, so active, that tremolos and other accompanimental formulae prevalent in the usual secondo parts are wholly absent. 

My review further ponders Mahler and Schubert, then summarizes Karol Berger’s acute extrapolation of Mahler’s “worldview.” It ends:

“The eventual result of Berger’s exegesis is an intellectual underpinning for Mahler’s quest that both affirms its continued pertinence and supports its ‘yea-saying.’ . . . Mahler in Berger’s view “is the first major composer whose work as a whole embodied in music some of the most essential features of the [new] age, its pluralist perspectivism and its lack of foundations.” Though this existential quest never culminated in a single answer, Mahler – pace Adorno – is at all times painstakingly truthful. I find [Berger’s] reading of Mahler – the man, the composer – both credible and moving. In fact, it is essential.” 

(I am rather recently the author of a novel: “The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York.” I have since turned it into a play, to be premiered in May 2026 at Colorado Mahlerfest.)

Stravinsky, Elmer Fudd, and the South Dakota Symphony

The final NEH-funded, multi-media “Music Unwound” concert featuring the South Dakota Symphony took place last Saturday night. I cast myself in a cameo role, playing the Soldier in three excerpts from Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale. I modelled my impersonation on Elmer Fudd.

The main events, however, were Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements with a visual presentation by Peter Bogdanoff. This was a scripted program with a continuous visual track and certain surprises straying far afield from classical music. The topic was “New World Encounters” – the impact of jazz abroad. 

The South Dakota Symphony continues to impress as the most innovative, most adventurous American orchestra I know. Saturday’s concert capped a full week of activity, mainly at South Dakota State University, where my book The Propaganda of Freedom is this semester’s “common read.” The participants, all week long, include Bavouzet (a lecture/recital on “Ravel and Jazz,” performed three times) and former US Ambassador to Russia John Beyrle.

The current SDSO season concludes April 26-27 with Douglas Moore’s Pulitzer-Prize winning opera Giants of the Earth — its first performance since 1951; it will also be recorded. SDSO’s signature Lakota Music Project undertakes a statewide tour in October 2025; it begins on Native American Day at the Crazy Horse Memorial and works its way eastward, stopping at the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations, among others. I will be participating in a week-long Shostakovich festival, with a full range of educational partners, in March 2026. The repertoire will include the Symphony No. 8 and (at multiple venues) The New Babylon — the entire 1929 silent film classic, with Shostakovich’s amazing score performed live.

“Music Unwound” – initiated a dozen years ago in partnership with the NEH — will conclude next season with a Black Classical Music festival at Indiana University/Bloomington, and “Mahler in America” at the Colorado Mahlerfest (May 2026). 

(Photos courtesy of SDSO percussionist Daniel Sailer)

The Erosion of the American Arts

The new issue of the online New American Studies Journal is devoted to the challenged fate of the arts. I append an overview of my contribution on “The Erosion of the American Arts.” To read the whole article, click here . To see the whole issue, click here .

The gripping cover story of the 2024 December issue of The Atlantic is “How the Ivy League Broke America.” David Brooks, its distinguished author, characteristically adapts a purview broader, more based in political and cultural memory, than that of other pundits. Here, he applies a fresh historical perspective to our current national crisis, arguing that an exaggerated emphasis on intellectual aptitude, traceable to the educational priorities of Harvard President James Conant (1933–1953), fostered a new “meritocracy”—an American ruling class defective in other human virtues. “Is your IQ the most important thing about you?” Brooks asks. He answers: “No. I would submit that it’s your desires—what you are interested in, what you love. We want a meritocracy that will help each person identify, nurture, and pursue the ruling passion of their soul.” 

Brooks is addressing the rampaging malaise that all acknowledge—friendlessness and depression; opioid addiction and rage; political and governmental dysfunction. The diagnoses he adduces (packed with social science statistics) are more compelling than the remedies he glimpses. And one obvious source of remediation is hiding in plain sight: Amid a dozen pages of dense argumentation, Brooks only once drops the word “art.” And yet, it seems to me obvious that a rapid erosion of the American arts as previously experienced—in child-rearing, education, and higher education; in civic identity; in media and social media; and in our daily lives—is a crucial impediment to nurturing “what you love” and pursuing “the ruling passion” of the soul. And I find myself ever more mindful of how fundamentally exposure to the arts has diminished during my own lifetime. 

A tidal continuum submerging the arts with entertainment may be traced in stages from silent film to film with sound, then color; to TV with its laugh and applause tracks: to youtube, with its loud and irrelevant ads; to social media and the segmentation of Americans into consumers of political and cultural pabulum. The ease with which entertainment pays commercial dividends, the alacrity with which it can today be produced and acquired, are fatal enticements. At every stage, engagement grows ever more supine. 

Are these impediments deeply rooted in the American experience, even within the very ethos of democracy and freedom? Certainly there is an impressive lineage of writings analyzing an American aversion to artists and intellectuals. An enduring philosophical argument against the American arts was launched by Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School. Much more recently, positing “a new theory of modernism,” the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls the governing dynamic “social acceleration” – and his prognoses are grim. 

With so much at stake, where does hope lie? Contrary to what might be thought or assumed, it cannot be said that America was never a fit home for the arts. During the Gilded Age, no one pondering issues of shared American identity would consider omitting the arts. In the decades after World War I, the arts were more widely but also more superficially acquired. 

In my essay, I emphasize the possibilities for innovation in his own field: orchestras. They were once an American bellwether. Two recent controversies drive home the moment – the resignation of Esa-Pekka Salonen as music director of the San Francisco Symphony, and the engagement of Klaus Makela as music director of the Chicago Symphony. Curating the American musical past, comparable to the efforts of art museums, remains unattempted. A case in point is the Charles Ives Sesquicentenary, ignored by the major US orchestras. 

The Tangled Legacy of JFK and the Cultural Cold War: America Needs a New Public Policy for the Arts

President Kennedy at Amherst College, where in a major arts address he extolled “free artists”

Today’s online Persuasion magazine carries my thoughts on “The Tangled Legacy of JFK and the Cultural Cold War: America Needs a New Public Policy for the Arts.” You can read it here.

Bottom-line, I write: “If, logically, American arts policy today should focus on greatly increasing government support at every level, never has this prospect seemed less likely. Now, too, is a logical moment for top-down cultural diplomacy to soften and inform relations with at least some governments deemed hostile or intractable.”

Here’s a longer extract:

It is little-known that, when he died, President John F. Kennedy was about to appoint Richard Goodwin – a vigorous member of his inner circle – his advisor on the arts. Kennedy’s initiative would have vitally supported the ongoing cultural Cold War with Soviet Russia. Something like it is ever more necessary today. The American arts – as will increasingly become widely apparent – are in crisis. And the United States, incongruously, still possesses no Ministry of Culture.

Kennedy’s arts advocacy was surpassingly eloquent. . . . At the same, time, however, the White House’s eagerness to host the likes of Igor Stravinsky and Pablo Casals was mired in Cold War rhetoric. The central dogma of the cultural Cold War, as pursued by the United States Government, was the notion that only “free artists” in “free societies” produce great art – a plainly unsupportable claim. . . . 

That the “propaganda of freedom” cheapened freedom by overpraising it, turning it into a reductionist propaganda mantra, is one measure of the intellectual cost of the Cold War. . . .  It also prejudiced Kennedy against government arts subsidies – lest artists discover themselves pushed and prodded by the state. And this prejudice lingers.

We are today witnessing an erosion of the arts far beyond the arts challenge that worried Kennedy. . . . 

Where will new funding arise? . . . Though the need for government support is now self-evident, though the American experiment in laissez-faire arts support can by now be pronounced a failure, there is no political will to create an Arts Council on the European model. We have no Jacob Javits or Claiborne Pell in Congress, no Nancy Hanks at the NEA. Social justice activism has fractured the arts community at a crucial moment. Widespread public awareness of the arts as a necessary component of a nation’s life remains mainly apparent abroad. If, logically, American arts policy today should focus on greatly increasing government support at every level, never has this prospect seemed less likely. Now, too, is a logical moment for top-down cultural diplomacy to soften and inform relations with at least some governments deemed hostile or intractable. . . .

An indispensable Cold War asset, cultural diplomacy concentrated JFK’s vision of a more civilized nation. But reductionist misunderstandings of the arts – as ambassadors of “freedom” or instruments of social justice – ultimately disserve America’s vital interests, whether at home or abroad.  

To read a related article on why the arts and social justice are strange bedfellows, click here:

For more about “The Propaganda of Freedom,” click here:

The Answer Is “Blowin’ in the Wind”

In my most recent NPR “More than Music” show – “’Blowin’ in the Wind’ – Music and American Identity” — the conductor JoAnn Falletta asks, “‘How can we grow as human beings without the arts?” She continues: 

“If you don’t learn through the arts as a child, you can’t open yourself up easily. I read once when I was very young that the arts help us deal with our mortality. That struck me, and it still strikes me. The only way you can have these feelings is if someone opens the door to you as a child, whether it’s taking you to a play which has an uncertain ending, or to a museum and looking at a painting that you can’t understand, or even a piece of music that might seem frightening but may be interesting.” 

Of Bob Dylan, she says:

“He’s not afraid to force us to listen. Even ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ — it’s terrifying, that nothing changes for the better. I don’t think there’s anything like that today. There are love stories. There are stories of anger, but nothing that forces us to look at ourselves, that makes us feel uncomfortable.”

The topic at hand is music that embodies the American experience today. I asked JoAnn and four others to pick a piece.

—John McWhorter chose a song from Jerome Kern’s Show Boat that mediates between Black and white;

—Michael Dease chose John Coltrane’s Blue Train.

—Allen Guelzo chose Charles Ives’s tribute to a Black Civil War regiment

—Timothy Long chose music that speaks to him as a Native American living in multiple worlds.

And I chose George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue: “It’s polyglot – it’s classical, it’s jazz, it’s Broadway, it’s Black, it’s Jewish. . . . And it’s always been controversial – patronized and deployed by generations of commentators as derivative and appropriative. And that controversy, in itself, surely tell us something about ourselves. . . . In fact it sounds like a work in progress – and what could be more ‘American’ than that?” 

I also cals Rhapsody in Blue “unfinished” – there isn’t even a definitive version of the score. “I would call that a defining attribute of America – a characteristic of the self-made American genius. . . . And then there is a matter of unfinished business — what W. E. B. Du Bois was talking about when he famously called ‘the problem of the color line’ the ’problem of the twentieth century.’ Gershwin put it all together – and if the outcome isn’t integrated, neither are we.”

To hear the show, click here.

For more on Rhapsody in Blue, click here.

For more on Ives and Colonel Shaw’s Black regiment, click here.

For a Listening Guide, keep reading:

00:00 — JoAnn Falletta on Bob Dylan

9:00 — Michael Dease on John Coltrane

15:30 — John McWhorter on Show Boat

21:00 — TImothy Long on Earl Kim

30:00 — Allen Guelzo on Charles Ives

39:00 — JH on Gershwin