Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall

From Publishers Weekly
Horowitz (Understanding Toscanini) surveys the course of classical music in America, discussing composers, performers, conductors, managers, entrepreneurs, critics and orchestras in a wide-ranging and provocative volume. The book's first half charts the vibrant years from the late 19th century to WWI, when major orchestras, including the Boston Symphony and the New York Philharmonic, were created, composers such as George Chadwick and Amy Beach were met with wide acclaim, and the visionary conductor Theodore Thomas was thrilling Gilded Age audiences. He makes a more contentious assessment of the period following WWI - a time of decline, in his view, as conductors and performers ignored new music and concentrated on works from the European past. Horowitz singles out Arturo Toscanini, who rarely conducted anything other than "canonized masterworks"; David Sarnoff, who created the NBC Symphony as a vehicle for Toscanini; and Arthur Judson, the powerful manager who promoted the familiar, conservative repertoire. Recycling the tried and true was a sure bet, and Horowitz blames this safer marketing strategy for our contemporary quandary: most composers of classical music find American audiences have little interest in what they have to offer. Horowitz doesn't deliver a solution to the problem, though, and his critical tone detracts from what is otherwise a valuable contribution to the history of classical music in this country. Illus. not seen by PW. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
In this large history, Horowitz traces developments through two centuries. Beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing to World War I, wealthy sponsors nurtured symphony orchestras in Boston and New York; orchestra members and conductors were mostly European. Opera, though centered in Boston and New York, included companies that traveled throughout the country; and New England and New York supported several composers whose music was played by their orchestras. The peak of classical performance occurred just before WWI. Thereafter, performance in America declined. American singers and performers grew in prominence in the 1930s, however, when their European counterparts were unable to cross the pond, and after 1950 American conductors, performers, and composers came into their own. But opera companies and orchestras declined as radio, television, and recordings replaced live concerts. Opera companies and orchestras reactively pursued marketing instead of music. Horowitz sees twenty-first-century growth in chamber groups pursuing contemporary music by Americans. Full of sketches of significant people and organizations plus critical commentary, this excellent, readable, concise history would grace any collection. Alan Hirsch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
A chronicle of the tensions and contradictions of a musical high culture borrowed and homegrown in unequal measure. Classical Music in America is a pioneering history by an award-winning scholar and leading authority on American symphonic culture. Joseph Horowitz argues that classical music in the United States is peculiarly performance-driven, and he traces a musical trajectory rising to its peak at the close of the nineteenth century and receding after World War I. He defines the decades of ascendancy as the quest for an American compositional voice, painting vivid vignettes of America's most celebrated performers and such pathbreaking institutions as the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera. He explores a century of decline characterized by illustrious orchestras, conductors, and virtuosos, mostly foreign born, and in a final chapter he exposes a crisis of leadership and suggests new musical directions in our postmodern age. As with his acclaimed cultural histories, Horowitz here fashions a sweeping narrative—packed with personality and incident, textured by literature, sociology, and intellectual history—that freshly illuminates the American experience. 32 pages of illustrations.


About the Author
Joseph Horowitz is the central authority on the institutional history of American classical music, with wide experience as an orchestral administrator and adviser. He is the author of six books and a regular contributor to the New York Times. He lives in New York City.


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Opinionated, stimulating account of how classical music failed to establish fruitful roots in America, from orchestral administrator and historian Horowitz (Wagner Nights, 1994, etc.). In his view, the critics, administrators, and patrons who shaped the development of "serious" music in the US made two fundamental errors: they preferred Europeans to native composers, and they favored masterpieces of the past over performances of contemporary classical works. These choices were not inevitable, Horowitz argues; in the 19th century, differing attitudes in the nation's two premiere cultural centers epitomized two potential paths. While Boston critic John Sullivan Dwight disdained "all need of catering to low tastes" and devoted himself to promoting "only composers of unquestioned excellence," New York-based conductor Theodore Thomas aspired "to make good music popular" through concerts including light music as well as such then-contemporary artists as Wagner, Berlioz, and Dvorak. (The last of whom was an enthusiastic admirer of African-American and other native musical strains.) Sympathetically yet critically assessing American composers ranging from George Chadwick and Louis Moreau Gottschalk to Steve Reich and John Adams, the author sees them generally swamped by the "culture of performance" that arose in the early 20th century and still dominates US conservatories and concert halls. Toscanini conducting Beethoven wowed the middlebrows, while Stokowski was controversial both for championing new music and for shaking hands with Mickey Mouse in Fantasia. Despite the pioneering efforts of Jeannette Thurber, who promoted opera sung in English and American musical training for Americancomposers, and the determined popularizing of Boston Symphony conductor Serge Koussevitsky (founder of Tanglewood) and his flamboyant protege Leonard Bernstein, classical music in the US remained the high-art preserve of the cognoscenti, to the detriment of its vitality and growth. Shrewd analyses of the role played by little-known managers like Arthur Judson and NBC founder David Sarnoff illuminate the commercial aspects of this unedifying tale. Unlike most lengthy texts, this one gets better as it progresses, drawing complex themes and a huge cast into a single overarching vision of a cultural attitude that has produced many fine artists and striking moments-but no institutional or intellectual support to sustain them.


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