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Rhapsody in Blue

The requiem for classical music is premature.

Nov 7, 2005, Vol. 11, No. 08 • By KELLY JANE TORRANCE
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Classical Music in America

A History of Its Rise and Fall

by Joseph Horowitz

Norton, 606 pp., $39.95

CRITICS HAVE BEEN SOUNDING THE death knell for classical music for years. Concerts are becoming more sparsely attended; radio stations are dropping the classical format; and new music premieres are becoming less and less frequent. As a Chicago newspaper succinctly concluded, "Experience teaches that the class which enjoys classical music is a small minority."

But that was no recent pronouncement; it was made at the end of the 19th century. Joseph Horowitz teaches us, in his commanding new book, that complaints made today about the public's taste--or lack thereof--are nothing new. Critics, composers, and conductors for at least a century-and-a-half have decried a public more interested in the easy and familiar than the new and challenging.

But as Horowitz would have it, it's not their fault. As can be deduced from its subtitle, this book is a passionate, not an "objective," history. The historian, former New York Times critic, and adviser to a number of American orchestras argues forcefully, and much of the time convincingly, for a very specific thesis: "America's music high culture has at all times (alas) been less about music composed by Americans than about American concerts of music composed by Europeans."

Horowitz surveys a century and a half of musical history in this country, and has found a neverending inferiority complex. We have never considered our own music good enough, instead developing first-class institutions that exist almost solely to celebrate the music of another continent. His story is one of orchestras and opera companies rather than composers.

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