Joseph Horowitz

Joseph Horowitz (born 1948 in New York City) is an American cultural historian whose seven books mainly deal with the institutional history of classical music in the United States. As a producer of concerts, he has played a pioneering role in promoting thematic programming and new concert formats. His tenure as Artistic Advisor and, subsequently, Executive Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (1992–1997) attracted national attention for its radical departure from traditional functions and templates.

Horowitz’s books treat the late nineteenth century as the apex of American classical music, before it generated into a “culture of performance“ spotlighting celebrity conductors and instrumentalists, whom he terms “performance specialists” in contradistinction to the composer/performers of an earlier era. He is also credited (as by Alex Ross in The New Yorker) with coining the phrase “post-classical music” to describe an emerging 21st century musical landscape merging classical music with popular and non-Western genres.

Horowitz’s treatment late Gilded Age culture challenges prevalent notions of “social control” and “sacralization” as defined by such cultural historians as Alan Trachtenburg and Lawrence Levine. In Wagner Nights: An American History and Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall, he argues that American classical music of the late nineteenth century cannot be viewed as an instrument of affluent elites. In Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music, he treats the “Toscanini cult” of the mid-twentieth century as a metaphor for the decline of classical music in the United States, arguing that the conductor Arturo Toscanini became the first non-composer to be widely regarded the “world’s greatest musician,“ and that no prior conductor of comparable eminence and influence had been so divorced from the music of his own time. Wagner Nights also proposes that American Wagnerism of the 1880s and 1890s was (compared to European and Russian Wagner movements) distinctly meliorist and “proto-feminist,“ the vast majority of American Wagnerites having been women.

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