Classical Music in America: A History of its Rise and Fall Joseph Horowitz W. W. Norton and Company 640 pp. ISBN: 0393057178 Available from Powell's Books.

New York and Boston were pivotal cities in America's early musical life. We learn in Classical Music in America that both had a strong tradition of presenting vocal music from the early 19th century onwards. Boston favored sacred music, oratorios performed by the Handel and Haydn society, whereas New Yorkers preferred opera. Still, Horowitz relates that Handel's Messiah was attended by enthusiastic crowds in New York, too -- maybe a little overly enthusiastic. At a performance of the work in 1858, the audience stopped the show when the conductor refused to encore the bass aria "The Trumpet Shall Sound", making such a calamitous noise that they scared the conductor off of the stage!

Symphony orchestras were also formed in both cities. The New York Philharmonic's inaugural season was in 1842, while the Boston Symphony gave its first concert in 1881. Horowitz points out that repercussions are still being felt today for some of the decisions made at the very beginning of American concert life. From their inception, both the NY Philharmonic and the BSO favored European repertoire and European conductors. Foreign maestros were brought in by impresarios to lead symphonies and opera companies. The music of Beethoven and Wagner loomed over the scene, making it a daunting environment for American composers trying to develop a voice of their own and a sense of national style. In the mid-19th century, Americans like Louis Moreau Gottschalk composed using indigenous materials, but even in this pursuit Americans have been overshadowed, in terms of publicity, by a European. Czech composer Antonin Dvorak's New World Symphony is far better known for its use of American folk music on the concert stage. By contrast, it took nearly a century after Gottschalk's death for his work to be significantly revived.

While the history itself is fascinating, anecdotes abound in American Classical Music. Horowitz spices up this nearly 700 page tome with colorful stories. As stirring as the performances led by conductors such as Toscanini, Mahler, and Koussevitzky were, there was equal drama present in their personalities, on and off of the podium. For example, at Toscanini's farewell concert the conductor, famous for memorizing music instead of using a score when conducting, lost his place, perhaps because he was overcome with emotion. Lest we think that things were more civilized in bygone days, the voracity with which newspapers pounced on the story, eagerly making Toscanini's lapse headline news, seems eerily similar to our own era's media vultures.

Horowitz's coverage of the Twentieth century focuses on the performance culture that plays so important a role in American concert life. Virtuoso soloists such as pianists Van Cliburn and Vladimir Horowitz become superstars with a rabid following. Conservatories of music sprung up throughout the country, with thousands of students attending them, hoping to be the next big soloist. While the technical capabilities of American musicians grew by leaps and bounds as a result, this environment of soloistic ambitions and its concurrent egoism inevitably rubs up against a numbers game: there are only so many spots for soloists. There are even a precious few openings in professional symphony orchestras each year. Thus, there are always a lot of disgruntled musicians struggling to find work; even those who land a symphony job struggle with feeling underpayed and underappreciated. In the odyssey that musicians undergo to launch a concert music career, only a certain small subset of pieces, mostly Eighteenth and Nineteeth century works, become the repertoire that they practice until their fingers bleed. While Beethoven and Brahms are ably served by this approach, it creates two problems for American classical music: a stagnation of programming and a lack of support for new works.

A book that finishes with a "fall" is bound to end ominously. Horowitz by no means suggests that the financial future of classical music is on firm footing (it's certainly in considerable peril), but he tries to provide a balanced view of the challenges that face the American classical establishment in what he calls the "post-classical" era. He is most eloquent in outlining the struggling state of the vast majority of American composers. Symphonies and opera companies have, in a dubiously constructed version of "playing it safe", favored an aging canonic repertoire of music by dead European men -- the small group of aforementioned pieces. As Horowitz puts it, "This blinkered obsession with the market, an act of denial in itself a symptom of decline, ignores that classical music is a composed music and can only fully flourish when buttressed by important living composers". While most large ensembles don't seem to get this, Horowitz points out that there are many chamber groups who program and champion American composers, giving them a creative outlet that, while not exactly lucrative, enables their work to continue. As one of these American composers, I'm not yet willing to concede our classical music to being past or "post", but when considered as a wake-up call and sounding of the alarm, Horowitz's arguments are compelling.

-- Christian Carey

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