Can anything be done to effect a rapprochement between the old and the new paradigms so that the heritage of classical music can be revivified for younger generations? One possible answer is being suggested by the scholar and critic Joseph Horowitz in his new book Dvořák’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music. Horowitz seems to say that it’s not necessary to topple canonical classical music idols as if they were the Buddhas of Bamiyan, because a rich parallel heritage of African-American classical music has been hiding in plain sight all along. He has assumed the role of a skilled art conservator who is cleaning up an old master, removing an overlayer to disclose a pentimento: an underlayer that is a veritable classical music 1619 project. And at the same time, in a series of six companion videos that he narrates (Dvořák’s Prophecy: A New Narrative for American Classical Music, produced by Naxos), Horowitz goes a good way toward remediating the problematic aspects of media literacy, sound-bite epistemology, Snapchat concentration spans, and anhistorical narcissism that bedevil our culture today.
Horowitz’s arguments are multiple. He contends that a visiting European composer, Antonin Dvořák, founded a new school of Americanist composition in the 1890s, based upon indigenous Black and Native American music (i.e. spirituals and tribal ritual songs), that was abandoned by mainstream 20th-century American classical composers; that several African-American composers were the true and only exponents of the Dvořák school but were severely neglected by classical music power centers, until very recently; that Charles Ives and George Gershwin (and Louis Moreau Gottschalk before them) embody the true autochthonous American art-music tradition; and that the American populism of Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Roy Harris is synthetic and inauthentic. It is a volley of iconoclastic salvos, not unlike that of Henry Pleasants’s book The Agony of Modern Music (1955), though Pleasants argued the antinomy was between abstract, atonal, modern art music and jazz, favoring the latter as America’s true classical music.
Horowitz also argues that the primary champion and practitioner of Native American–based art music, the white Anglo-American composer Arthur Farwell, has not only been unfairly neglected, but is also still vexed by the charge of cultural appropriation. These and other questions are teased out both in his book and in the accompanying six videos, which focus on Dvořák, Ives, Black composers, Bernard Herrmann, Lou Harrison, and Copland, respectively. As a group, these videos (along with a CD of Farwell’s music) sweep together a vast canvas of miscellaneous, sometimes tenuously related Americana, though all are interestingly told. The video documentaries eschew the Ken Burns style of rapid montage and instead go into deep focus. Talking heads speak at length rather than in sound bites. The music on the soundtracks, performed by the Washington, D.C.–based PostClassical Ensemble (of which Horowitz is executive director) and conducted by Angel Gil-Ordóñez, is not interrupted by hyperkinetic visual montages or multiple voiceovers. It’s the documentary equivalent of “slow food”; there is room to absorb and think and remember.