Composed by, for Americans

The decline of classical music, often announced in the news media, sometimes in obituary terms, has long been a reliable trigger for lamentation or schadenfreude, as the case may be. It is therefore not surprising that Joseph Horowitz should cast his impressive chronicle, “Classical Music in America,” in a rigid framework of its rise and fall. Horowitz, who began his career as a music critic, is a presenter of concerts and festivals; he is the author of important studies of musical life in New York -- on the reception of Wagner in the 1880s and the Toscanini phenomenon of the 1930s and ‘40s -- from which he draws liberally here. He’s a voluble, often caustic writer, fast-paced, fabulously informed and always ready with an astonishing fact or factoid.

(In the 1920s, the New York Philharmonic included no more than 20 native-born players. In 1918, 29 German-born Boston Symphony members were interned, along with its conductor. More than a century earlier, about 150 operas had been mounted in New Orleans; slaves could sit in the gallery.)

Book One covers music’s “birth and growth” in the United States to World War I. It is a tale of two cities well told, and well shaped by the difference (as well as the contrast and tension) between Boston, America’s original cultural bellwether -- prudent, patrician, closed, homogeneous (since the Irish were excluded) -- and New York, whose newly arrived ethnic mix could be as open and innovative as it was fickle and voracious. Henry Higginson founded the Boston Symphony Orchestra, nurtured it, built its hall and hired its conductors; Andrew Carnegie built Carnegie Hall, then switched his attention to peace and education. New York eagerly hailed Antonin Dvorak’s extended stay and his exemplary “New World” symphony, with its evocation of Native American and African American melodies. Boston sneered at such impurities.

In both cities, music in the late 19th century was “sacralized,” allowing listeners to experience its manifold pleasures as something more: as uplift. Influential critics led the way in this process, with publicists, marketeers and musicians close behind. If Beethoven loomed almost godlike in Boston, it was Wagner who truly rocked New York; it took New York just three seasons to premiere every one of his enormous late operas. Audiences of as many as 3,000 flocked to hear adored Wagnerian conductor Anton Seidl exert his magic twice a day for a 14-day festival at Brighton Beach, next to Coney Island.

Book Two (the “decline and fall”) covers music from World War I to the present, a historical span that can’t be analyzed along geographical and ideological lines, or anything as simple and elegant. Boston soon left the main action to New York, but music also flourished in what the author calls the “hinterlands.” Desacralized by wartime hysteria, German music in America took a long time to recover, if it ever has.

For Horowitz, the New York scene was tangled and dominated by the rise of a “culture of performance.” More and more hype and spin was -- and is -- devoted to performers than to the music performed. He deplores superstars such as Fritz Kreisler and Jascha Heifetz, Enrico Caruso and Kirsten Flagstad, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Vladimir Horowitz -- or, more precisely, the publicity machines that directed and supposedly stultified their careers.

The symphony orchestra comes first on this author’s scale of musical values, and he cites the career of Arturo Toscanini as the culture of performance at its most debilitating. Toscanini dominated orchestral life in New York for more than two decades. He was elevated into “an American culture God” by a consortium of promoters -- David Sarnoff of NBC, the New York Times and other purveyors of “music appreciation.” He was exposed and excoriated first in various writings by Theodor Adorno, then in Joseph Horowitz’s 1987 book “Understanding Toscanini.”

My advice to Horowitz: Get over it. Toscanini was a great conductor who brought music to millions, never mind the massive exertions of his support system. Unlike nearly all his colleagues at the podium, Toscanini in his New York years played next to new music and owed some of his popularity to that fact.

Meanwhile, in “hinterland” Philadelphia, Leopold Stokowski premiered about 2,000 works, most of them American. And the endless commissions by Serge Koussevitzky (continuing to this day under the Koussevitzky foundations) for the Boston Symphony included four symphonies by Roy Harris, Aaron Copland’s “Third Symphony” and Bela Bartok’s “Concerto for Orchestra,” which became one of the last solid additions to the standard repertory, along with Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” (introduced by Toscanini).

A central postulate behind Horowitz’s history is the impossibility of classical music taking root in America without a repertory of American music. The real damage done by the culture of performance was not so much the disregard of music as the stifling of it in America. The rise-and-fall narrative of “Classical Music in America” meshes with a cyclical quest as generation after generation of composers struggles to found a national repertory.

The book’s many composer biographies hinge on two questions: Is the person’s music authentically American? Has it been accepted as such by the public -- or, rather, by the promoters and marketeers who manipulate the public? The author has original, perceptive and often laudatory things to say about individual American compositions, but by putting the test this way, his candidates are bound to fail repeatedly (or disqualify themselves, as Charles Ives did by simply shunning the public). The great American symphony that ought to have followed Dvorak’s example never came. Durability, let alone greatness, was beyond the reach of the turn-of-the-20th-century Boston composers -- a “genuine American school of shared interests, enthusiasms and interests,” discussed at length and with rare sympathy.

It is moving to read of the tireless, multi-tiered campaigns on behalf of American music promoted by Copland after World War I, and by Leonard Bernstein, Horowitz’s chief witness after World War II. But their symphonies failed -- as did Harris’ “Third Symphony” of 1939, for all the fervid hopes it inspired. The grading curve certainly works to the disadvantage of Copland, who wrote “Billy the Kid” and “Appalachian Spring” (said to have achieved “enduring popularity among American listeners”) and who established “the tough and spacious sound world of Hollywood Westerns to come.”

The candidate for our own time is John Adams, composer of “Harmonium,” “Nixon in China” and “Doctor Atomic,” due at the San Francisco Opera this fall. Adams is treated somewhat gingerly in a significant “Postlude” on music since 1975, the year Philip Glass wrote the opera “Einstein on the Beach.” For quite some time now, Glass, Steve Reich, Adams and most younger composers have been writing pieces with ample infusions that include rock, Zen, postmodern thought structures and Asian and South American music of all varieties. This, we are told, makes them “post-classical”; they are writing for a new nonelite audience in new nonsymphonic formats. A “new American ripeness” is in the air. Increasingly, Adams is seen -- and sees himself -- as America’s composer for the current century.

Horowitz also points to many other good things on classical music’s still capacious plate. There are “eclectic” performers such as Yo-Yo Ma and the Kronos Quartet, record companies Nonesuch and Naxos, presenters such as the now-retired Harvey Lichtenstein at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, conductors Esa-Pekka Salonen and Michael Tilson Thomas (yes, California gets a look-in) -- and given his unusually high regard for critics, he could have mentioned Alan Rich of LA Weekly and Alex Ross of the New Yorker.

But there’s no good reason to set all this apart as a new category called “post-classical” music. Why isn’t it simply the latest phase -- following several other distinguishable phases -- of classical music in America? Horowitz the historian stumbles here, while Horowitz the journalist-chronicler registers more and more occurrences, trends and tendencies, surfing the centuries and leaving no name undropped. It would have taken only a few keystrokes to reconfigure the postlude into a final, rather upbeat chapter. More keystrokes would be needed to mitigate the severe mood imposed more generally on a fascinating and ebullient story.

We would also need a new title, maybe something like “Classical Music in America: Keeps on Truckin’.” *