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Joseph Horowitz

Classical Music in America

A History of Its Rise and Fall

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.

Joseph Horowitz was born in New York City in 1948. He was a music critic for The New York Times from 1977 to 1980. His previous books are Conversations with Arrau (1982, winner of an ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award), Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music (1987), The Ivory Trade (1990), Wagner Nights: An American History (1994, winner of the Irving Lowens Award of the Society of American Music), The Post-Classical Predicament (1995), and (for young readers) Dvorak in America: In Search of the New World (2003). From 1992 to 1997 he served as artistic advisor and then executive director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, resident orchestra of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and there pioneered in juxtaposing orchestral repertoire with folk and vernacular sources, engaging gamelan orchestras, flamenco dancers and singers, and Russian and Hungarian folk artists; the orchestra won the American Symphony Orchestra league's 1996 Morton Gould Award for innovative programming. He has subsequently served as an artistic advisor to various American orchestras, most regularly the New Jersey Symphony and the Pacific Symphony. He has also co-founded, with the conductor Angel Gil-Ordonez, the Post-Classical Ensemble, a chamber orchestra in Washington, DC. He has taught at the Eastman School, the Institute for Studies in American Music at Brooklyn College, the New England Conservatory, the Manhattan School of Music, and Mannes College. He regularly contributes articles and reviews to the Sunday New York Times, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and the Times Literary Supplement (UK); other publications for which he has written include American Music, The American Scholar, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, The Musical Quarterly, The New York Review of Books, and Nineteenth Century Music. He is the author of "Classical Music" for both the Oxford Encyclopedia of American History and the Encyclopedia of New York State. He lives in New York with his wife, Agnes, and children Bernie and Maggie. To contact Joseph Horowitz with comments or questions, email horowitz4@juno.com

Classical Music in America book jacket

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March 2005 / hardcover / ISBN 0-393-05717-8 / 6" x 9" / 640 pages / Music/Classical