Furtwangler and Shostakovich: Bearing Witness in Wartime
Today’s on-line “The American Interest” carries a greatly expanded version of my blog of Feb. 25 (scroll down for Shostakovich and Ives):...
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josephirvinghorowi
Feb 25, 20204 min read
Furtwangler in Wartime
Books continue to be written about what it was like to live in Germany under Hitler. I wonder if any of the authors have auditioned...
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josephirvinghorowi
Feb 9, 20204 min read
The Best of the “Black Symphonies”
For this weekend’s “Wall Street Journal” I have written an impassioned encomium for William Dawson’s thrilling “Negro Folk Symphony” of...
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josephirvinghorowi
Jan 21, 20205 min read
Allan Bloom, Identity Politics, and “Closed Minds”
Looking for another book not long ago, I stumbled upon Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. In 1987, it was a national...
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josephirvinghorowi
Jan 5, 20203 min read
JFK’s Cold War Cultural Dogma — and Where It Came From
During the cultural Cold War, President John F. Kennedy delivered eloquent speeches claiming that only “free societies” fostered great...
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josephirvinghorowi
Jan 3, 20201 min read
“Best of the Year” — The Gamelan Experience: From Debussy to Lou Harrison
PostClassical Ensemble’s “Cultural Fusion: The Gamelan Experience,” presented on January 23, 2019, at the Washington National Cathedral,...
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josephirvinghorowi
Dec 23, 20194 min read
“Pique Dame” at the Met — and at the Bolshoi
The Bolshoi Theatre The formidable Norwegian soprano Lisa Davidsen, making her Metropolitan Opera debut in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades,...
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josephirvinghorowi
Dec 15, 20196 min read
America’s Forbidden Composer: Take Two — Listening to Arthur Farwell
“America’s forbidden composer” is Arthur Farwell (1872-1952), leader of the “Indianists” movement in music. As I’ve discussed in a recent...
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josephirvinghorowi
Nov 9, 20195 min read
Porgy — Take Four
Curtain call for “Porgy and Bess” with Rouben Mamoulian in glasses The latest installment of Conrad L. Osborne’s indispensable opera blog...
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josephirvinghorowi
Nov 4, 20199 min read
America’s Forbidden Composer
— I — “Arthur Farwell is probably the most neglected composer in our history. . . . At the turn of the century no one wrote music with...
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josephirvinghorowi
Oct 20, 20194 min read
Solomon Volkov on Stalin and Shostakovich
Of Joseph Stalin the culture-czar, Solomon Volkov comments: “People underestimate the level of control that Stalin maintained. I once...
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josephirvinghorowi
Oct 13, 20192 min read
Is Porgy a “Stereotype”? — Take Three
Kevin Deas Kevin Deas, the exceptional bass-baritone who is the anonymous “Porgy” of my previous blog, has written to me at greater...
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josephirvinghorowi
Oct 11, 20193 min read
Is Porgy a “Stereotype”? — Take Two
Sidney Poitier as Porgy Of the interesting emails I received in response to my American Scholar review of Porgy and Bess, the most...
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josephirvinghorowi
Oct 9, 20192 min read
Why “Porgy and Bess” and the Met Need One Another
To read my review of the Met’s new “Porgy and Bess,” just posted online by “The American Scholar,” click here. It begins: That the...
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josephirvinghorowi
Sep 21, 20193 min read
Why Did American Classical Music “Stay White” — Take Two
William Dawson Picking up on my American Scholar piece, Tom Huizenga of National Public Radio interviewed me about the fate of black...
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josephirvinghorowi
Sep 12, 20192 min read
Why Did American Classical Music “Stay White”?
William Dawson In 1893 Antonin Dvorak, teaching in New York City, predicted that a “great and noble school” of American classical music...
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josephirvinghorowi
Aug 31, 20193 min read
What Happened Between Vladimir Horowitz and George Szell?
George Szell “As admirers of Horowitz’s musicianship and resilience, we must face these realities remembering that, in the end, he loaded...
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josephirvinghorowi
Aug 28, 20195 min read
Busoni, Kandinsky, Schoenberg — Instinct at the Cusp
It’s a truism that, as aesthetic movements go, the visual arts get there first. Think of Impressionism, which didn’t begin to inflect...
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josephirvinghorowi
Aug 26, 20193 min read
Harry Burleigh and Cultural Appropriation – Take Two
The annals of the Harlem Renaissance include heated debate over the practice of turning African-American spirituals into concert songs....
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josephirvinghorowi
Aug 11, 20192 min read
“Heedlessly Controversial” — Remembering Oscar Levant
Reviewing Sony Classical’s invaluable new Oscar Levant tribute in the current “Los Angeles Review of Books,” I write: “That Levant was...
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