Horowitz — Dvořák's Prophecy

Author: Joseph Horowitz
Title: Dvořák’s Prophecy: And the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music
Year: 2021
Type: Book (W. W. Norton; foreword by George Shirley)

Dvořák’s Prophecy: And the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music is a book by the cultural historian Joseph Horowitz, published by W. W. Norton in November 2021 with a foreword by the tenor George Shirley. It starts from Antonín Dvořák’s statement of 1893 that the future music of the United States must be founded on what were called “negro melodies.” It argues that the prediction did not come true because three modernists, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein and Virgil Thomson, built a “standard narrative” of American classical music that dismissed what came before it, leaving Black composers such as William Grant Still, Florence Price and William Levi Dawson in obscurity. Its evidence is the history of those composers and of the white composers Horowitz offers as an alternative lineage, from Charles Ives to George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Book Marks classified six reviews: raves in the Wall Street Journal and Kirkus, which called it “Essential cultural history,” a positive review in the Washington Post, mixed reviews in Booklist and Publishers Weekly, and a pan in the Boston Review, where Douglas Shadle argued that the book treats Blackness as an abstract aesthetic category. It won an ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award in 2022.

W. W. Norton published the book on November 9, 2021.¹ In 1893 Antonín Dvořák, in an interview for the New York Herald, said that he was “now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called the negro melodies.”^{2, 3} Kirkus wrote that his prophecy encouraged Black composers, among them his assistant, Harry Burleigh, and the English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, to write classical works steeped in African American folk music.¹ The book, as Kirkus summarized it, holds that Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein and Virgil Thomson “maintained that there was no American music of consequence before 1910.”¹ Douglas Shadle, in the Boston Review, gives the cutoff as the 1920s. In his account Horowitz calls their story a “standard narrative” and an “Oedipal revolt” against the Gilded Age, and in 1958 Bernstein called the pre-1920 generation “the kindergarten period” of American music.³ Horowitz writes that the United States is “a nation stained with twin original sins,” the treatment of Indigenous Americans and of enslaved Africans.⁴

Kirkus summarized the book’s case that Still, Price and Dawson, though taken seriously between the world wars, “plunged into obscurity because they didn’t fit into the modernist narrative.”¹ William Grant Still in 1931 and Florence Price in 1933 preceded William Levi Dawson, who in the musicologist Gwynne Kuhner Brown’s account became “the third African American composer whose symphony was premiered by a major American orchestra” when Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra premiered his Negro Folk Symphony on November 14, 16 and 17, 1934. A performance at Carnegie Hall followed on November 20, the date NPR gives for the premiere.⁵ Shadle wrote that the book “is really about three white (male) composer protagonists,” Gershwin, Charles Ives and Arthur Farwell, and that it ranks George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess “the highest creative achievement in American classical music.”³ Kirkus wrote that the book comes down on the side of artists’ freedom to draw on any tradition, and that its foreword, by the African American tenor George Shirley, makes the most forceful defense of that position.¹

Book Marks classified six reviews: raves in the Wall Street Journal and Kirkus, a positive review in the Washington Post, mixed reviews in Booklist and Publishers Weekly, which found the book “rife with murky pronouncements,” and a pan in the Boston Review.⁶ John Check, in the Wall Street Journal, wrote that Horowitz “writes powerfully and with enviable authority,” though he suggested that Horowitz might overrate Ives and underrate Copland.⁶ Martha Anne Toll, a violist, wrote in the Washington Post that the book “made clear how much was missing” from her own training, though she found that it “presumes a level of knowledge that many readers will not have.”^{6, 7} Kirkus called it “Essential cultural history” and “feisty and opinionated but always backed by solid evidence.”¹

Tim Riley, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, found that it “lacks charisma” and that, “as a white man with a prescriptive argument,” Horowitz “treads gently around the most sensitive aspects of his topic.” Riley called Dvořák’s proclamation itself an echo of the “patronizing and contemptible idea” that enslaved and Indigenous peoples carry an innate creative force for others to tap.⁴ Shadle, the musicologist, granted that Horowitz shows the modernists knew little about the past. He counted the words “racism” and “racist” four times in the book against more than a hundred in Kira Thurman’s Singing Like Germans, a metric he called crude, and wrote that the book makes Blackness “an abstract aesthetic category divorced from human bodies.” Its critique of the standard narrative, he wrote, “in several ways applies to his own book.”³ In October 2022 the ASCAP Foundation gave the book a Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award in the concert field.⁸

Key contributions

• Dvořák’s prediction of 1893, and the Black composers it encouraged, as the starting point of a Black American classical music that was later written out.
• The “standard narrative” of Copland, Bernstein and Thomson, which dismissed the American music before it, as a cause of that erasure.
• The symphonies of Still, Price and Dawson and their premieres between the world wars.
• An alternative lineage of American classical music from Dvořák through Ives to Porgy and Bess.

See also

• The Music of Black Americans — Eileen Southern’s 1971 history of Black American music
• Classical Music in America — Horowitz’s 2005 history of classical music in the United States
• Classical music — the tradition
• The color line in pop — the color line as industry infrastructure, from market categories to radio formats