I am a cultural historian specializing in the American arts. I pursue parallel careers as a scholar/writer and concert producer. The most recent of my eleven books is Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music (winner of a 2022 ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award). It links to six “Dvorak’s Prophecy” documentary films I produced for Naxos (I am especially proud of the one on Charles Ives).
My forthcoming books are The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York (April 2022, my first novel) and The Propaganda of Freedom: JFK, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and the Cultural Cold War (Sept. 2023).
I regularly produce 50-minute “More than Music” radio documentaries for NPR via the newsmagazine “1A,” heard on over 400 stations nationally. I continue to serve as a program curator for orchestras and festivals in all parts of the US.
As Executive Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic in the 1990s, I was a pioneering creator of humanities-infused public programming (“Dvorak and America,” “The Russian Stravinsky,” “American Transcendentalists,” etc.). I have 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).
These days I also frequently perform as a keyboard accompanist. And I’ll be creating a music/dance work, “Einsamkeit,” collaborating with the bass trombonist David Taylor and the choreographer Igal Perry; it premieres in June 2023 via Peridance Contemporary Dance Ensemble.
As an advisor to Naxos’s “American Classics” series, I’ve produced 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.
Of my books, Understanding Toscanini was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Wagner Nights: An American History was named best book of the year by the Society of American Music, and Classical Music in America: A History and Artists in Exile were both named best books of the year in The Economist.
My website is www.josephhorowitz.com.