Dvorak's Prophecy

Horowitz is determined to overcome the 'silo mentality' that has dulled curiosity about how American classical music can be related to the larger cultural context across different eras(...) This perspective is what makes [his] larger project such a vital resource for rethinking how American music matters.--Thomas May Gramophone (3/29/2022 12:00:00 AM) [A] sincere and erudite effort to right ignorance and wrongs, and to bring this long-forgotten music into the sunlight.--Martha Anne Toll Washington Post (12/10/2021 12:00:00 AM) A clarion call for American classical music to 'acquire a viable future.' . . . [F]eisty and opinionated but always backed by solid evidence. Essential cultural history.-- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) In his exploration of the unused past of Dvorak, Ives, Farwell, Burleigh, Dett, Dawson, Price and Gershwin, Joseph Horowitz invites us to a marvelous rediscovery... A feast awaits, both in this book and in the music it describes.--Allen C. Guelzo, James Madison Program in American Ideal and Institutions, Princeton University [In Dvorak's Prophecy] Horowitz has taught me to listen to Black classical music as what the most American of classical music is. His lesson should resound.--John McWhorter New York Times (12/14/2021 12:00:00 AM) Dvorak's Prophecy...will facilitate much-needed discussion about the way we regard the American classical music traditions--discussions not at all limited to the classroom.--Larry Starr, author of American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to mp3 Dvorak's Prophecy is a passionately-argued and -written book that will stir deep and long, long overdue discussion...Horowitz is a master of the hitherto unrevealed, and he's on his best game in this book.--Dale Cockrell, author of Everybody's Doin' It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York 1840-1917 Dvorak's Prophecy will become a flashpoint for necessary conversations not only about the performing arts, but also broader issues of import: race, American historiography, and the search for our national soul.--Lorenzo Candelaria, Dean of the Blair School of Music, Vanderbilt University Joseph Horowitz's Dvorak's Prophecy is unique in its emphasis on the connections between major nineteenth-century American literary figures like Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain and American classical music, and it is admirable in its demonstration of the centrality of African American literature, culture, and history to both the American musical tradition and the American literary tradition.--Brian Yothers, author of Reading Abolition