Horowitz on Dvorak

The Chronicle of Education has a terrific article on Dvorak and African-American music by Joseph Horowtiz, who knows this period in American musical history better than just about anybody. Horowitz writes of Dvorak's interest in black music and his encouragement of black composers--themes touched on in Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise. It's worth reading the article in its entirety--as well as Ross's book, of course. One point Horowitz makes cogently:

"Dvorak's prophecy that 'negro melodies' would foster an 'American school of music' came true, but in ways he could not have predicted. Dvorak had in mind symphonies and operas audibly infused with the black vernacular — but there is only one Porgy and Bess. Rather, the black tunes Dvorak adored fostered popular genres to which American classical music ceded leadership."

I don't want to oversimply, but let's face it: American music is black music. It's impossible to think of American music without spirituals, ragtime, jazz, rhythm and blues, and countless other African-American folk sources. And not just in popular music: spirtiuals and ragtime make their way into Ives, jazz was plundered by many composers, and contemporary composers are trying their best to work rock (derived from R&B after all) into their music, generally in the form of pulse or beat.

Horowitz's article puts all of this in the broader cultural context of the late 19th- and early 20th centuries, where American musical life was turbulent and fast-changing. It's not the staid Victorian world we imagine. But one thing that was true was the virulence of racism, and it is what forced Dvorak's prophecy to turn out as it did--bequeathing a strict divergence between "popular" and "serious" traditions that we are still reckoning with today.

(Via A&L Daily)