Dvorák’s Prophecy: And the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music

American classical music turned away from Black music and other folk traditions to its lasting detriment, according to this knotty cultural history from music critic and historian Horowitz (Artists in Exile). Reflecting on Czech composer Antonín Dvorák’s 1893 declaration that American music would be “founded upon... negro melodies,” Horowitz argues, that, on the contrary, American classical music went mainly in a Eurocentric, modernist direction that was uneasy with jazz and other Black influences, thus opening a permanent divide between highbrow art music and lowbrow pop music. He surveys some 20th-century Black classical composers, including William Dawson, Florence Price, and Harry Burleigh, but his focus is on such white composers as Charles Ives and George Gershwin, whose incorporation of Black vernacular styles into their works made them “the twin creative geniuses of American classical music.” Rife with murky pronouncements—“as creative seedbeds, free societies are less efficacious than usable pasts”—much of the book is a tart polemic against 20th-century critics and composers including Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland for embracing a snooty modernism and for their “Oedipal” dismissal of forerunners who blended classical and vernacular music. Unfortunately, Horowitz’s preoccupation with long-forgotten, avant-garde critical controversies make this interpretation of America’s protean musical development feel dated. (Nov.)

Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly identified Arthur Farwell as a Black composer.