Horowitz — Dvořák's Prophecy

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

In 1893, Antonín Dvořák told the New York Herald he was “now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called the negro melodies” — a “great and noble school of music” built on the material his assistant, the Black baritone and composer Harry Burleigh, had sung to him.¹ This book is about why that didn’t happen. Horowitz’s culprits are three modernists, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Virgil Thomson, whose “standard narrative” of American music, an “Oedipal revolt” against the Gilded Age in Horowitz’s phrase, “maintained that there was no American music of consequence before 1910”; Bernstein in 1958 waved off everything earlier as “the kindergarten period.”² What the narrative buried, the book calls “a failure of historical memory” in a nation “stained with twin original sins,” and its restored canon runs through Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whom the prophecy encouraged directly, to the Black symphonists of the interwar years.³

The recovered records are the book’s best argument. William Grant Still’s Afro-American Symphony reached a major orchestra in 1931. Florence Price’s Symphony in E minor followed with the Chicago Symphony in 1933, and Eleanor Roosevelt sat in the audience for her Third in 1940. William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony, which Horowitz calls “buried treasure,” premiered under Stokowski in 1934 and “took the house by storm.” Then all three, in Kirkus’s summary of the book’s case, “plunged into obscurity because they didn’t fit into the modernist narrative.”⁴ Horowitz’s own spine for the counter-history reaches from Dvořák through Charles Ives to George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, which the book ranks “the highest creative achievement in American classical music,” and he built the argument a delivery system: six Naxos documentary films written and produced in tandem with the book, described as “an act of advocacy.”⁵

The reception split along the book’s own fault line, and the split belongs in the record. Kirkus called it “Essential cultural history” and named it a best book of 2021, and the Wall Street Journal praised its “enviable authority.” The Washington Post’s critic, a classically trained violist, wrote that “this book made clear how much was missing” from her own education.⁶ The dissents cut deeper. Tim Riley, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, read the prophecy itself as a white-privilege proclamation — the “patronizing and contemptible idea” that the enslaved “carry some innate creative force that we ought to tap into” — and faulted Horowitz for building a pedestal on it while writing “as a white man with a prescriptive argument.”⁷ The musicologist Douglas Shadle’s Boston Review pan went to the method: the words “racism” and “racist” appear only four times in the book, Blackness becomes “an abstract aesthetic category divorced from human bodies,” and the critique of the standard narrative “in several ways applies to his own book.”⁸ The book arrives on this shelf with its opposition attached. It is the family’s loudest recent argument about the classical color line, the same wall this site tracks across pop, gospel, and R&B, and the scholarly ground the fight stands on was laid a half century earlier, on this same shelf, by Eileen Southern.

Key contributions

• The prophecy as hinge: Dvořák’s 1893 Herald proclamation, and Burleigh’s role in it, made the origin story of an American music that was then unmade.
• The standard-narrative indictment: Copland, Bernstein, and Thomson’s “pastlessness” as an active act of canon-building that wrote the pre-1920 generation, and its Black composers, out.
• The recovered symphonists: Still, Price, and Dawson restored to the record with dates, premieres, and the paper trail of their erasure.
• The reception as evidence: Riley’s and Shadle’s critiques — the corrective itself accused of aestheticizing race — document how contested the repair of a canon is.

See also

• The Music of Black Americans — the scholarly foundation this debate stands on, written from inside the tradition
• Classical Music in America — the same author’s institutional history, to which this book is the racial corrective
• Classical music — the family whose American canon this book tries to repair

Footnotes

1. Dvořák’s Herald proclamation quoted verbatim as carried in Tim Riley’s review, Los Angeles Review of Books, January 28, 2022; the “great and noble school” phrasing and Burleigh’s role per Douglas Shadle, “Classical Music and the Color Line,” Boston Review, December 15, 2021 and Kirkus’s review (all accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

2. The villains and the inner quote (“maintained that there was no American music of consequence before 1910”) per Kirkus’s review; “standard narrative,” “pastlessness,” and “Oedipal revolt” as the book’s terms, and Bernstein’s 1958 “kindergarten period” remark, per Shadle’s Boston Review essay (both accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

3. “A failure of historical memory” per Kirkus; the “twin original sins” passage quoted verbatim per Riley’s LARB review; Coleridge-Taylor as the prophecy’s direct encouragement per Kirkus (all accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

4. The Still/Price/Dawson milestone sequence (1931/1933/1934, the third under Stokowski) per NPR’s Negro Folk Symphony account and Negro Folk Symphony, Wikipedia; “buried treasure” and “took the house by storm” per the review carried at aaron-copland.com; the Eleanor Roosevelt detail per the same carrier; the obscurity sentence quoted verbatim per Kirkus (all accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

5. The “crippled spine” counter-history passage and the Porgy and Bess ranking quoted verbatim per Shadle’s Boston Review essay; the six-film Naxos series and “an act of advocacy” per the Naxos series page and Joseph Horowitz, Wikipedia (all accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

6. Kirkus’s verdict and best-of-2021 status per its review; the Wall Street Journal’s John Check (“Mr. Horowitz writes powerfully and with enviable authority”) per the Book Marks roundup; Martha Anne Toll’s Washington Post review as block-quoted by Symphony, the League of American Orchestras’ publication (all accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

7. All Riley passages quoted verbatim per his LARB review (accessed July 20, 2026); Riley aims the “innate creative force” indictment at Dvořák’s proclamation itself and faults Horowitz’s deification of it. ↩

8. All Shadle passages quoted verbatim per his Boston Review essay (accessed July 20, 2026). ↩