Horowitz Questions America’s 250-Year Classical Music Promise as Orchestras Still Favor European Repertoire
Updated
Updated · The New York Times · Jun 30
Horowitz Questions America’s 250-Year Classical Music Promise as Orchestras Still Favor European Repertoire
1 articles · Updated · The New York Times · Jun 30
Summary
At America’s 250-year mark, Joseph Horowitz argues the country has not fulfilled its classical-music promise because major orchestras still rely mainly on European works.
Around 1900 marked an apex for that ambition, he writes, citing Boston’s Henry Lee Higginson, Chicago’s Theodore Thomas and New York’s Anton Seidl as builders of a serious national culture.
Horowitz ties that early promise to Antonin Dvorak’s 1893 prediction that Black musical traditions could help create a distinctly American concert-music school.
A 1938 Metropolitan Opera broadcast of Verdi’s “Otello,” discussed with composer Derek Bermel, serves as Horowitz’s example of a lost intensity in performance and a tradition America absorbed rather than remade.