A Vital New Book about Music and Race
Dale Cockrell’s “Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music, and Dance in in New York 1840-1917” is a book that will bring to wider attention the...
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josephirvinghorowi
Jul 29, 20194 min read
Re-Thinking Aaron Copland
How did Aaron Copland’s film music attempt to counteract the Hollywood influence of Erich Korngold? To what degree did he draw...
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josephirvinghorowi
Jul 28, 201916 min read
Ferruccio Busoni: “A Fresh Gust of Air”
Preparing an August 15 Busoni/Schoenberg/Kandinsky program for The Phillips Collection in DC, I discovered myself newly entranced by one...
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josephirvinghorowi
Jul 19, 20192 min read
A Fidelio for Yesterday
Faced with a twelve-hour drive, with wife and dog, from Manhattan to the idyllic Brevard (North Carolina) Music Festival, I threw some...
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josephirvinghorowi
Jul 5, 20192 min read
Who Was the American Bartok?
Who was the American Bartok? The most plausible candidate, I would say, is Arthur Farwell (1872-1952), who led the “Indianists” movement...
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josephirvinghorowi
Jun 30, 20193 min read
Whitman and Music: A Fresh Discovery
It’s said that Walt Whitman has been set to music more than any other poet save Shakespeare. Oddly, the most memorable of these settings...
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josephirvinghorowi
Apr 30, 20196 min read
Why “Porgy and Bess” Is More than a “Period Piece”
However popular it may be, Porgy and Bess remains an object of rampant controversy and confusion. An odd item in the New York Times the...
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josephirvinghorowi
Apr 9, 20192 min read
Music from Paradise
Claude Debussy wrote: “But my poor friend! Do you remember the Javanese music, able to express every shade of meaning, even unmentionable...
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josephirvinghorowi
Apr 3, 20191 min read
Mark Twain, Charles Ives, and Race
In the current issue the quarterly review Raritan, I write that Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Charles Ives’s Symphony...
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josephirvinghorowi
Mar 5, 20191 min read
Did Wagner Exploit King Ludwig?
Did Wagner exploit King Ludwig? In Luchino Visconti’s magnificent four-hour film Ludwig, the king is ingeniously cast as an embodiment of...
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josephirvinghorowi
Feb 24, 20197 min read
Dvorak, Harry Burleigh, and Cultural Appropriation — a “PostClassical” Podcast
Could Harry Burleigh — Antonin Dvorak’s African-American assistant — be considered an Uncle Tom? These days, the question comes up...
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josephirvinghorowi
Feb 8, 20195 min read
Lou Harrison and The Great American Piano Concerto — Reprised
Eight years ago, on the occasion of PostClassical Ensemble’s first performance of Lou Harrison’s Piano Concerto with Benjamin Pasternack...
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josephirvinghorowi
Dec 19, 20186 min read
Falla and Flamenco — “The Birth of Spanish Music”
According to my friend the remarkably loquacious Spanish pianist Pedro Carboné, the “birth of Spanish music” occurs during the third of...
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josephirvinghorowi
Dec 8, 20181 min read
High Culture Without Apologies — What Orchestras Can Do
The current Weekly Standard has a long piece by me about the future of American orchestras. I write that orchestras can help us to heal...
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josephirvinghorowi
Nov 26, 20186 min read
How South Dakota Shows What Orchestras Are For
Beginning in the 1860s, the conductor Theodore Thomas – a symphonic Johnny Appleseed – began touring the entire United States with his...
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josephirvinghorowi
Oct 9, 20183 min read
Jonas Kaufmann vs. the Orchestra of St. Luke’s
My father, who grew up on the Lower East Side, probably never heard opera until – like other Jews of his generation facing American...
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josephirvinghorowi
Oct 5, 20188 min read
Stokowski and Ormandy — What Happened in Philadelphia?
As I write in Understanding Toscanini (1987): “In 1932, in a minor cause celebre, Wilhelm Furtwangler was discovered likening American...
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josephirvinghorowi
Sep 30, 20184 min read
The Artist and His Audience
As many who follow baseball know, Jacob deGrom is an artist. It’s not just that he’s likely to win the National League Cy Young Award. Or...
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josephirvinghorowi
Sep 21, 20185 min read
Rachmaninoff Uncorked — Take Two: RCA, Ormandy, and the Cork
Charles O’Connell, who commanded “artists and repertoire” for RCA Victor from 1930 to 1944, left a book of reminiscences – The Other Side...
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josephirvinghorowi
Sep 18, 20183 min read
Rachmaninoff Uncorked
Today’s “Wall Street Journal” includes my review of “one of the most searing listening experiences in the history of recorded sound” —...
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