Horowitz — Classical Music in America

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

Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall is a book by the cultural historian Joseph Horowitz, published by W. W. Norton in 2005. It calls classical music in the United States “a mutant transplant” and argues that it peaked in the 1890s and declined after the First World War into a culture of performance, centered on great conductors, orchestras and instrumentalists and on the European masterpieces of the past, without the foundation of native works by native composers that Americans had once expected. Its evidence is a history of American classical music in two parts, “Birth and Growth” and “Decline and Fall,” which opens and closes on the Boston critic John Sullivan Dwight and the band leader Patrick Gilmore’s Peace Jubilee of 1869. Kirkus called it an “opinionated, stimulating account” that gets better as it goes. The interviewer Daniel Felsenfeld reported that Joseph Kerman, reviewing the book, asked whether the “post-classical” music Horowitz finds after the decline might be just another phase of classical music.

Horowitz, a cultural historian who was a music critic for the New York Times from 1976 to 1980 and then artistic advisor and executive director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic from 1992 to 1997, published the book with W. W. Norton in March 2005.¹ It is in two parts, “Queen of the Arts: Birth and Growth” and “Great Performances: Decline and Fall.”²

Horowitz writes that “compared to classical music in its European homeland, classical music in the United States is a mutant transplant,” and that Americans once assumed their musical high culture “would evolve from a foundation of native works by native composers.”³ He has said that he finds the music’s American peak in the 1890s and its decline after the First World War, and that “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 Kirkus summarized the book’s case as two errors by the critics, administrators and patrons who shaped serious music in the United States: they preferred Europeans to native composers, and they favored masterpieces of the past over contemporary work.⁵

The book places the start of that preference in the nineteenth century, with John Sullivan Dwight, the Boston critic who, Kirkus wrote, disdained “all need of catering to low tastes.”⁵ Dwight’s promotion of dead European composers, in Horowitz’s account, defined classical music against popular culture, and Dwight called Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” a “melodic itch.”⁴ Horowitz writes of “the American penchant for sacralization,” which raised the symphony onto a high altar, and contrasts it with Gustav Mahler, who in New York “interacted creatively, compositionally” with the scores of Beethoven and Schubert and “felt no impulse to worship on bended knee.”³ As a thought experiment, Horowitz has said, the book asks what would have happened had Arturo Toscanini never come to the United States. His answer is that Leopold Stokowski, a conductor passionately interested in contemporary music, would have been the most famous American classical musician.⁴ A section titled “composers on the sidelines” follows Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and their generation as they struggled for a hearing amid the culture of performance.⁴

The book opens with the Peace Jubilee of 1869, held in Boston by Patrick Gilmore, whom Horowitz calls “the most famous band leader in America,” with its anvil-pounding firemen.⁴ It closes by returning to it: Gilmore’s eclecticism, “mixing high and low, New Worlds and Old,” embodied what classical music was not, and “today, closing the circle, it is Dwight who signifies the past and Gilmore who suggests the future.”³ Horowitz has called the music that follows the decline “post-classical,” a music that no longer divides high culture from popular culture, and has named John Adams, Steve Reich and Philip Glass as composers to whom the label “classical” no longer fits.⁴

Kirkus, in its issue of January 1, 2005, called the book an “opinionated, stimulating account of how classical music failed to establish fruitful roots in America,” and wrote that, unlike most long books, it gets better as it goes.⁵ Daniel Felsenfeld, interviewing Horowitz, said that Joseph Kerman’s review asked why post-classical music should not be considered just another phase. Horowitz said that a reader who found the book “too gloomy” might be right, though he did not think of it as a gloomy book.⁴ Jon Gonder, in CAML Review in 2006, wrote that it would serve as a point of reference for future generations.⁶

Key contributions

• Classical music in the United States as a “mutant transplant” that rose to a peak in the 1890s and declined after the First World War.
• The decline defined as a culture of performance, centered on conductors, orchestras and instrumentalists, with American composers on the sidelines.
• A history framed by John Sullivan Dwight’s sacralized canon and Patrick Gilmore’s mixing of high and low.

See also

• The Rest Is Noise — Alex Ross’s 2007 history of twentieth-century classical music
• Dvořák’s Prophecy — Horowitz’s 2021 book on Dvořák and a Black American classical tradition
• Classical music — the tradition whose American history the book tells