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Created by Sha FrasierBrooklyn, NY · 2026

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Horowitz — Classical Music in America

Cited in 5 notes
(1978) Music for 18 Musicians, Classical music, Horowitz — Dvořák's Prophecy, Ross — The Rest Is Noise, Southern — The Music of Black Americans

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Author: Joseph Horowitz
Title: Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall
Year: 2005
Type: Trade history (W. W. Norton)

In 1869, the bandmaster Patrick Gilmore staged his Peace Jubilee in Boston — a chorus of ten thousand, an orchestra of a thousand, and a hundred helmeted, red-shirted firemen banging anvils in the Anvil Chorus — while the critic John Sullivan Dwight, whose “worshipful promulgation of dead European composers” was defining “classical music” in America, recoiled; Dwight is the man who called Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” a “melodic itch.”1 Horowitz, a former New York Times music critic who later ran the Brooklyn Philharmonic, builds six hundred pages between those two poles and tells the American story as an arc: a real peak in the 1890s, decline setting in after World War I. The two books that structure it say so on their covers: “Queen of the Arts: Birth and Growth,” then “Great Performances: Decline and Fall.”2 The last lines close the circle: “Today… it is Dwight who signifies the past and Gilmore who suggests the future.”3

The diagnosis has a name, and Horowitz states it plainly: “What defines the decline is the focus on the act of performance, on the great conductors and orchestras and instrumentalists, rather than on the composer.”4 American classical music became a performance culture — a “mutant transplant” lacking “a foundation of native works by native composers,” with the concert orchestra rather than the opera house as its central institution.5 The book’s test case is the difference between two eras of the same job. When Gustav Mahler conducted in New York, “he interacted creatively, compositionally, with their scores; he felt no impulse to worship on bended knee”; the later era brought what Horowitz calls the “penchant for sacralization,” embodied in the celebrity of Arturo Toscanini, the first non-composer to be widely regarded as the world’s greatest musician — the case Horowitz had already spent a whole earlier book, Understanding Toscanini, dissecting.6 His counterfactual gives the thesis its teeth: had Toscanini never come to America, the most famous American classical musician would have been Leopold Stokowski, “yet the culture of performance would still have triumphed.”7 Meanwhile a section called “composers on the sidelines” follows Aaron Copland and his generation struggling, in Horowitz’s phrase, to be heard “amid the din.”8

“Opinionated” is the reception’s recurring adjective, and Horowitz’s opening Apologia concedes the ground: selective, openly personal, with a taste for moralizing about the missteps it describes.9 The judgment mostly landed anyway — Kirkus starred it as “an opinionated, stimulating account of how classical music failed to establish fruitful roots in America,” the Economist called it “a comprehensive, convincing analysis of the contemporary dilemma,” and a music-librarians’ journal predicted it “will serve as an important point of reference for future generations.”10 The book’s coda names what comes after the fall: “post-classical music,” Horowitz’s term for a moment that no longer stratifies high against popular, led in his telling by the minimalists — of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians he says flatly that it “has got to be one of the most important concert works ever composed by an American, period.”11 The book’s job on this shelf is the institutional explainer: why American classical life means orchestras playing Europeans, and why the composers this family’s American story celebrates spent a century fighting the very institutions built in music’s name.

Key contributions

  • The performance-culture thesis: America built its classical life around celebrity performers and imported masterpieces, and the composer moved to the margins.
  • The rise taken seriously: the 1890s peak — Gilded Age orchestras, civic ambition, Dvořák’s American moment — treated as real achievement, which is what makes the fall a fall.
  • The sacralization diagnosis: Mahler’s working relationship to scores against the bended-knee worship that followed, with Toscanini as the culture’s chosen idol.
  • The post-classical coda: the wall between high and popular ceasing to hold, with minimalism as the American music that walked through it.

See also

  • The Rest Is Noise — the century told globally; its FDR-era America chapter crosses this book’s decline years
  • Dvořák’s Prophecy — the same author’s racial corrective, sixteen years later, to the story this book tells
  • Classical music — the family whose American institutions this book explains

Footnotes

  1. The Gilmore Peace Jubilee detail and the “melodic itch” line per Horowitz’s NewMusicBox interview with Daniel Felsenfeld; “worshipful promulgation of dead European composers” from the book’s closing passage as Horowitz quotes it in the same interview (accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

  2. Horowitz as New York Times music critic (1976–1980) and Brooklyn Philharmonic executive director (1992–1997) per Joseph Horowitz, Wikipedia; the peak-and-decline arc in his words (“it peaks in the 1890s… the decline sets in after WWI”) per the NewMusicBox interview; the two-book structure per the Internet Archive item’s contents listing (all accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

  3. The closing passage quoted verbatim as Horowitz reads it in the NewMusicBox interview (accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

  4. Quoted verbatim from the NewMusicBox interview (accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

  5. “Mutant transplant” and the missing “foundation of native works by native composers” (Apologia, p. xiii) and the concert-orchestra-not-opera-house institutional claim (p. 188) per Lucy Abrams-Husso’s essay on Horowitz’s writings, which quotes the book with page numbers (accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

  6. The Mahler passage (p. 190) and “penchant for sacralization” (p. 191) per Abrams-Husso’s essay; Understanding Toscanini (1987) and its first-non-composer framing per Joseph Horowitz, Wikipedia (both accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

  7. The Stokowski counterfactual quoted verbatim from the NewMusicBox interview (accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

  8. The section title and the Copland-and-Thomson sidelines account per the NewMusicBox interview (accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

  9. The Apologia’s concessions as characterized in the scholarly review of the book carried at Project MUSE (review metadata; accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

  10. Kirkus quoted verbatim per its review; the Economist line as carried in the book’s editorial-review apparatus per the Amazon hardcover listing; the future-generations verdict per Jon Gonder’s review in CAML Review 34, no. 1 (2006) (all accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

  11. The post-classical coinage and the Music for 18 Musicians verdict quoted verbatim from the NewMusicBox interview (accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

Published July 20, 2026