Dvorak's Prophecy: And the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music

Dvorak's Prophecy: And the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music PDF Author: Joseph Horowitz
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393881253
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book

Book Description
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 A provocative interpretation of why classical music in America "stayed white"—how it got to be that way and what can be done about it. In 1893 the composer Antonín Dvorák prophesied a “great and noble school” of American classical music based on the “negro melodies” he had excitedly discovered since arriving in the United States a year before. But while Black music would foster popular genres known the world over, it never gained a foothold in the concert hall. Black composers found few opportunities to have their works performed, and white composers mainly rejected Dvorák’s lead. Joseph Horowitz ranges throughout American cultural history, from Frederick Douglass and Huckleberry Finn to George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and the work of Ralph Ellison, searching for explanations. Challenging the standard narrative for American classical music fashioned by Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, he looks back to literary figures—Emerson, Melville, and Twain—to ponder how American music can connect with a “usable past.” The result is a new paradigm that makes room for Black composers, including Harry Burleigh, Nathaniel Dett, William Levi Dawson, and Florence Price, while giving increased prominence to Charles Ives and George Gershwin. Dvorák’s Prophecy arrives in the midst of an important conversation about race in America—a conversation that is taking place in music schools and concert halls as well as capitols and boardrooms. As George Shirley writes in his foreword to the book, “We have been left unprepared for the current cultural moment. [Joseph Horowitz] explains how we got there [and] proposes a bigger world of American classical music than what we have known before. It is more diverse and more equitable. And it is more truthful.”

Dvorak's Prophecy: And the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music

Dvorak's Prophecy: And the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music PDF Author: Joseph Horowitz
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393881253
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book

Book Description
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 A provocative interpretation of why classical music in America "stayed white"—how it got to be that way and what can be done about it. In 1893 the composer Antonín Dvorák prophesied a “great and noble school” of American classical music based on the “negro melodies” he had excitedly discovered since arriving in the United States a year before. But while Black music would foster popular genres known the world over, it never gained a foothold in the concert hall. Black composers found few opportunities to have their works performed, and white composers mainly rejected Dvorák’s lead. Joseph Horowitz ranges throughout American cultural history, from Frederick Douglass and Huckleberry Finn to George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and the work of Ralph Ellison, searching for explanations. Challenging the standard narrative for American classical music fashioned by Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, he looks back to literary figures—Emerson, Melville, and Twain—to ponder how American music can connect with a “usable past.” The result is a new paradigm that makes room for Black composers, including Harry Burleigh, Nathaniel Dett, William Levi Dawson, and Florence Price, while giving increased prominence to Charles Ives and George Gershwin. Dvorák’s Prophecy arrives in the midst of an important conversation about race in America—a conversation that is taking place in music schools and concert halls as well as capitols and boardrooms. As George Shirley writes in his foreword to the book, “We have been left unprepared for the current cultural moment. [Joseph Horowitz] explains how we got there [and] proposes a bigger world of American classical music than what we have known before. It is more diverse and more equitable. And it is more truthful.”

Dvorák's Prophecy

Dvorák's Prophecy PDF Author: Joseph Horowitz
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0393881245
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 A provocative interpretation of why classical music in America "stayed white"—how it got to be that way and what can be done about it. In 1893 the composer Antonín Dvorák prophesied a “great and noble school” of American classical music based on the “negro melodies” he had excitedly discovered since arriving in the United States a year before. But while Black music would foster popular genres known the world over, it never gained a foothold in the concert hall. Black composers found few opportunities to have their works performed, and white composers mainly rejected Dvorák’s lead. Joseph Horowitz ranges throughout American cultural history, from Frederick Douglass and Huckleberry Finn to George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and the work of Ralph Ellison, searching for explanations. Challenging the standard narrative for American classical music fashioned by Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, he looks back to literary figures—Emerson, Melville, and Twain—to ponder how American music can connect with a “usable past.” The result is a new paradigm that makes room for Black composers, including Harry Burleigh, Nathaniel Dett, William Levi Dawson, and Florence Price, while giving increased prominence to Charles Ives and George Gershwin. Dvorák’s Prophecy arrives in the midst of an important conversation about race in America—a conversation that is taking place in music schools and concert halls as well as capitols and boardrooms. As George Shirley writes in his foreword to the book, “We have been left unprepared for the current cultural moment. [Joseph Horowitz] explains how we got there [and] proposes a bigger world of American classical music than what we have known before. It is more diverse and more equitable. And it is more truthful.”

Classical Music In America

Classical Music In America PDF Author: Joseph Horowitz
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393057171
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 664

Get Book

Book Description
An award-winning scholar and leading authority on American symphonic culture 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 19th century and receding after World War I.

New Worlds Of Dvorak With Cd Unabridged Compact Disc

New Worlds Of Dvorak With Cd Unabridged Compact Disc PDF Author: Michael B Beckerman
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393047066
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Get Book

Book Description
In this reinterpretation of Dvořák's personality and work, Beckerman explores the composer's life and music, focusing on the composer's three-year stay in the United States.

Dvo_‡k

Dvo_‡k PDF Author: David Hurwitz
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9781574671070
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Get Book

Book Description
(Unlocking the Masters). The music of Antonin Dvorak defies fashion. He is one of the very few composers whose works entered the international mainstream during his own lifetime, and some of them have remained there ever since. The pieces that historically define his international reputation, however, represent only a small fraction of what he actually composed. They comprise just one facet of his complex and remarkably rich artistic personality. This book/2-CD pack invites readers to celebrate his extraordinary achievement and experience the pleasure of getting to know more than 90 of his most important works. The two full-length CDs from Suprahon Records include 22 works.

Dvořák in America

Dvořák in America PDF Author: Joseph Horowitz
Publisher: Marcato Books
ISBN: 9780812626810
Category : Composers
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
An account of Antonin Dvorak's 1890s stay in America, where he took the essences of Indian drums, slave spirituals, and other musical forms and created from them a distinctly new music.

Singing Like Germans

Singing Like Germans PDF Author: Kira Thurman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150175985X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 434

Get Book

Book Description
In Singing Like Germans, Kira Thurman tells the sweeping story of Black musicians in German-speaking Europe over more than a century. Thurman brings to life the incredible musical interactions and transnational collaborations among people of African descent and white Germans and Austrians. Through this compelling history, she explores how people reinforced or challenged racial identities in the concert hall. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, audiences assumed the categories of Blackness and Germanness were mutually exclusive. Yet on attending a performance of German music by a Black musician, many listeners were surprised to discover that German identity is not a biological marker but something that could be learned, performed, and mastered. While Germans and Austrians located their national identity in music, championing composers such as Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms as national heroes, the performance of their works by Black musicians complicated the public's understanding of who had the right to play them. Audiences wavered between seeing these musicians as the rightful heirs of Austro-German musical culture and dangerous outsiders to it. Thurman explores the tension between the supposedly transcendental powers of classical music and the global conversations that developed about who could perform it. An interdisciplinary and transatlantic history, Singing Like Germans suggests that listening to music is not a passive experience, but an active process where racial and gendered categories are constantly made and unmade.

ITS OUR MUSIC TOO

ITS OUR MUSIC TOO PDF Author: Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Publisher: Middle Passage Press
ISBN: 9780692781876
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 128

Get Book

Book Description
Groundbreaking Book Explores the Black Impact on Classical Music Earl Ofari Hutchinson meticulously details in his It's Our Music Too The Black Experience in Classical Music the black impact on classical music. Hutchinson notes that there are numerous books which have dissected and re-dissected every possible aspect of classical music-the composers, performers, their compositions, the musical structure, the history, and even the gossip and minutiae about the composers and performers. Yet, there are almost no books that focus on the significant part that black composers and performers played in influencing and in turn being influenced by classical music "The list of Africans, African-Americans and Afro-European composers, conductors, instrumental performers, and singers," says Hutchinson, "is and always has been, rich, varied, and deep. Sadly, the recognition of this has almost always come in relation to the work of a major European or white American composer." Hutchinson's aim in It's Our Music Too The Black Experience in Classical Music is not to update a book on blacks and classical music, or list the many notable individual breakthroughs of top flight black classical music performers and composers through the years. Instead he tells the story of how blacks have actually influenced the development, history and structure of classical music in its major varied forms; opera, chamber pieces, symphonies, and concertos. It's a story that's filled with tragedy and triumph, heart break and heroism. Hutchinson gives an exciting and entertaining glimpse into Mozart's "borrowing" a musical idea from the black violin virtuoso Chevalier Saint-Georges in the eighteenth century, Dvorak's basing a major part of his New World Symphony on Negro Spirituals in the nineteenth century, and composers such as Gershwin, Copeland. Stravinsky and Ravel, wildly embracing jazz and blues in some of their popular and acclaimed works in the twentieth century. It's Our Music Too The Black Experience in Classical Music is a fast paced, reader friendly, easy to understand look at just exactly what and how the greats in classical music have borrowed from and paid homage to jazz, blues, ragtime, boogie woogie and Negro spirituals. "Throughout I name and recommend many pieces to listen to by the greats of classical music," notes Hutchinson, "who were directly inspired by black musical forms as well as the works of black composers who have written exceptional works that have influenced the works of other classical composers." Hutchinson also tells how black performers such as Roland Hayes with his unique interpretations of German leider, and Marian Anderson and Jessye Norman with their distinctive tones and vibrant, fresh renderings of, and subsequent path breaking performances in the major works of opera giants, Giuseppi Verdi and Richard Wagner have greatly altered how these master's works are heard today. It's Our Music Too The Black Experience in Classical Music, takes the reader on an exciting, eye opening, and revealing journey through the world of classical music in which the major critics, composers and performers tell in their words their appreciation of the major contribution blacks made to classical music. "It is no exaggeration or overstatement to say that classical music does owe a debt to the black experience in classical music," says Hutchinson, "And the goal is to show music lovers and readers how that debt continues to be paid in concert halls everywhere."

Chopin

Chopin PDF Author: James Huneker
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 438

Get Book

Book Description


Major Labels

Major Labels PDF Author: Kelefa Sanneh
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525559604
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 497

Get Book

Book Description
One of Oprah Daily's 20 Favorite Books of 2021 • Selected as one of Pitchfork's Best Music Books of the Year “One of the best books of its kind in decades.” —The Wall Street Journal An epic achievement and a huge delight, the entire history of popular music over the past fifty years refracted through the big genres that have defined and dominated it: rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance music, and pop Kelefa Sanneh, one of the essential voices of our time on music and culture, has made a deep study of how popular music unites and divides us, charting the way genres become communities. In Major Labels, Sanneh distills a career’s worth of knowledge about music and musicians into a brilliant and omnivorous reckoning with popular music—as an art form (actually, a bunch of art forms), as a cultural and economic force, and as a tool that we use to build our identities. He explains the history of slow jams, the genius of Shania Twain, and why rappers are always getting in trouble. Sanneh shows how these genres have been defined by the tension between mainstream and outsider, between authenticity and phoniness, between good and bad, right and wrong. Throughout, race is a powerful touchstone: just as there have always been Black audiences and white audiences, with more or less overlap depending on the moment, there has been Black music and white music, constantly mixing and separating. Sanneh debunks cherished myths, reappraises beloved heroes, and upends familiar ideas of musical greatness, arguing that sometimes, the best popular music isn’t transcendent. Songs express our grudges as well as our hopes, and they are motivated by greed as well as idealism; music is a powerful tool for human connection, but also for human antagonism. This is a book about the music everyone loves, the music everyone hates, and the decades-long argument over which is which. The opposite of a modest proposal, Major Labels pays in full.