A PostClassical Ensemble ‘More than Music’ film series
Written and produced by Joseph Horowitz
Visual presentation by Peter Bogdanoff

‘The six Dvořák’s Prophecy films I have created with Peter Bogdanoff are an act of advocacy.

‘As in my companion book Dvořák’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music, my premise is that the “standard narrative” for classical music in the US – the one I grew up with, popularized by Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein – shortchanges the American achievement. Following W.E.B. Du Bois, who called the “sorrow songs” of Black America “the singular spiritual heritage of the nation,” and Antonín Dvořák, who prophesied that “negro melodies” would find a “great and noble” American school, I begin not with Copland and the modernists, but with Dvořák and his protégé Harry Burleigh, who turned “Deep River” into a sublime concert song. I treat Charles Ives as an American creative genius comparable to Whitman and Melville. The standard narrative makes no room for a morbid Romantic like Bernard Herrmann – to my ears, the most under-rated 20th-century American composer, and not just for his terrific film scores. It omits William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony – forgotten following its galvanizing 1934 premiere by Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. And it fails to reckon with Lou Harrison, whose majestic Piano Concerto may be the most formidable by any American. The films therefore argue for a longer, more eventful New World odyssey, documenting both democratic ideals and the legacy of slavery.’

Buffeted by social and political currents, Copland can seem unmoored: a cork in a stream. He was politicised by the Depression – and by the example of Mexico, whose artists galvanised national identity and progressive thought. This film features a re-enactment of Copland’s grilling by Senator Joseph McCarthy (played by Edward Gero). It also highlights the most consequential Copland score we don’t know: his ingenious music for Lewis Mumford’s 1939 World’s Fair film The City (Naxos DVD 2110231), itself a complex product of the Popular Front. We reconsider the valedictory Piano Fantasy (Naxos 8559184), in which Copland refreshed his modernist roots – a galvanising performance by Benjamin Pasternack, who also recalls a telling encounter with the composer.

Playing time: 78 minutes