Joseph Horowitz is an award-winning author, concert producer, film-maker, broadcaster, and pianist/composer. He is one of the most prominent and widely published writers on topics in American music. As an orchestral administrator and advisor, he has been a pioneering force in the development of thematic programming and new concert formats.
Horowitz’s most recent books are a novel, The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York (shortly to become a play), and The Propaganda of Freedom: JFK, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and the Cold War.
Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music (W. W. Norton, 2021) proposes a “new paradigm” for the history of American classical music. It was published in tandem with a series of six documentary films produced for Naxos. The film series, also titled “Dvorak’s Prophecy,” led to an ongoing series of 50-minute “More than Music” National Public Radio documentaries, produced by Horowitz for the daily newsmagazine “1A”; it is heard on 500 public radio stations nationally.
Horowitz’s ten previous books mainly deal with the history of classical music in the United States. Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music (1987) was named one of the year’s best books by the New York Book Critics Circle. Wagner Nights: An American History (1994) was named best-of-the-year by the Society of American Music. Both Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall (2005) and Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts (2008) made The Economist’s year’s-best-books list.
Horowitz’s forthcoming book is a study of Charles Ives.
As Executive Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic in the 1990s, Horowitz was a pioneering creator of humanities-infused public programming (“Dvorak and America,” “The Russian Stravinsky,” “American Transcendentalists,” etc.). He has pursued this template ever since — as curator of the Pacific Symphony’s annual American Composers Festival, as curator of an annual Winter Festival for the New Jersey Symphony, as co-founder and Executive Director of DC’s PostClassical Ensemble (2003 to 2022).
Since 2011 Horowitz has directed Music Unwound, an NEH-funded national consortium of orchestras and universities dedicated to curating the American musical past. As director, Horowitz is currently overseeing five festivals celebrating the Charles Ives Sesquicentenary in 2024, as well as festivals exploring Black Classical Music and the impact abroad of American jazz. The partnering organizations include the Jacobs School of Music (Univ. of Indiana), The Orchestra Now (Bard College), the Chicago Sinfonietta, the South Dakota Symphony (for which Horowitz serves as Scholar-in-Residence), Colorado Mahlerfest, and the Brevard Music Festival (lead partner).
As an advisor to Naxos’s “American Classics” series, Horowitz has produced CDs featuring never before recorded works by Arthur Farwell, Bernard Herrmann, and Silvestre Revueltas, as well as DVD versions of the films “Redes,” “The City,” “The River,” and “The Plow that Broke the Plains” with the soundtracks (Revueltas, Copland, and Thomson) newly recorded.
Post-Covid, Horowitz has also become active as a composer and performer. His bass trombone concertino, “Mahlerei,” has been performed at the Kennedy Center, Colorado Mahlerfest, and the Brevard Festival. His song cycle “Einsamkeit” (also with bass trombonist David Taylor) adapts songs by Mahler and Schubert; it was premiered (with dancers) by the Peridance Contemporary Dance Company in New York City. More recently, Taylor and Horowitz have begun performing their version of Schubert’s Winterreise, including a concert at Bargemusic (Brooklyn, NY). As a vocal accompanist, Horowitz frequently performs with tenor George Shirley and the baritone Sidney Outlaw. His Hiawatha Melodrama (in collaboration with Michael Beckerman) has been widely programmed by American orchestras, and twice abroad; it is recorded on Naxos.
Horowitz was a New York Times music critic (1976–80). He subsequently initiated an annual all-day “Schubertiade” at the 92nd Street Y before becoming executive director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH (twice), NYU, Columbia University, and CUNY and was also awarded an Honorary Doctorate by DePauw University. He has taught at the New England Conservatory, Colorado College, the Mannes School, the Manhattan School of Music, and SUNY-Purchase.
His website is https://www.josephhorowitz.com/