The New York Times invited me to attempt a succinct assessment of classical music in the US, from its beginnings to today. My response runs in today’s paper:
Last fall, I found myself in a South Dakota hotel lobby talking with the composer Derek Bermel. Days before, I learned that his clarinet teacher had played in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. I asked whether he knew the Met broadcasts from the 1930s and ’40s. He did not.So I emailed him a supreme opera performance: Verdi’s “Otello,” as broadcast on Feb. 12, 1938. The conductor is Ettore Panizza. The principal singers are Giovanni Martinelli, Lawrence Tibbett and Elisabeth Rethberg. Bermel reported back that what he heard sounded fundamentally different from any other Verdi he had encountered — and more galvanizing.
While we were earnestly cogitating about why that was the case, unbeknown to us, Chris Eagle Hawk was listening from an adjoining table. (Eagle Hawk, who died late last year, was a sagacious Lakota tribal elder I was privileged to know.) He turned to us and said three words: “They felt it.” That ended the conversation.
Classical music in the United States is borrowed from Europe, and that borrowing was initially ambitious and impressive. An apex was attained around 1900. Colossal leadership was furnished in Boston, where Henry Lee Higginson invented the Boston Symphony Orchestra and built Symphony Hall. In Chicago, Theodore Thomas founded the Chicago Orchestra (now the Chicago Symphony Orchestra) after decades of barnstorming coast to coast with his world-class Thomas Orchestra. In New York, Anton Seidl, once Richard Wagner’s surrogate son, led a Wagnerism movement that dominated national intellectual discourse. He also led symphonic concerts 14 times a week during the summer at Coney Island. Seidl’s best friend in Manhattan was Antonin Dvorak, who, as director of the National Conservatory of Music in 1893 predicted that “Negro melodies” would foster a “great and noble school” of New World concert music.
Probably none of these individuals would have anticipated that 250 years after the birth of the United States, the country’s orchestras would still mainly be playing European repertoire.
The sorrow songs Dvorak esteemed inspired genres of American popular music known the world over. But an ample American concert canon never materialized. Instead, a “culture of performance” presided, privileging celebrity conductors, instrumentalists and singers over composers.
With the passing of stellar immigrant musicians over the course of the 20th century, it became harder for American performers and composers to nurture Old World traditions — or to grow commensurate New World roots. Today, that twin failure breeds an absence of binding purpose, both musically and institutionally.
The failure takes many forms. As any sampling of broadcasts from New York, Boston and Philadelphia in the 1930s and ’40s will confirm, today’s orchestras “feel it” less and less. Our composers, comparably, lack access to lineage. Although American music is finally being performed in quantity, too much of what we hear is makeshift and detached from the ballast of tradition. On top of that is the world we live in: short attention spans and dwindling financial resources for the arts. That the sesquicentenary for Charles Ives, the United States’ foremost concert composer, was in 2024 more celebrated in Germany than in his own country signifies a crippling erosion of cultural memory.
One positive development is a dawning awareness among American institutions that systemic change may prove an urgent priority. Here are some snapshots, from the East Coast, the West Coast and the Midwest.
Empty Seats, but a New Era Rises in the East
Symphony Hall in Boston is riddled with empty seats. The Boston Symphony once privileged distinguished local composers and later served as a national laboratory for new American works. Now, the orchestra’s programing is anonymous. Judging from its Carnegie Hall visits, it also isn’t playing very well. The musicians, the administration and the board are at odds over the dismissal of the music director, Andris Nelsons, making him a martyr when his departure is most needed.
A Boston Symphony planning document, leaked to the press and patrons with tumultuous consequences, proposes “symphonic cycles,” “festivals” and “programmatic themes that build connections across several weeks of B.S.O. concerts.” Such programing, it says, is “easier to market to targeted audiences.”
The same prospectus advocates “humanities-based collateral presentations, including lectures, panel discussions, demonstrations and workshops,” as well as “affinity programming, intended to appeal to segments of our communities who have not traditionally felt welcomed.” These changes “are neither radical nor even especially novel,” the document adds. In fact, they sound perfectly plausible. And if they prove to be novel, so much the better.
Down the coast, the New York Philharmonic has embarked upon a new era under Gustavo Dudamel, who aspires to become as identified with New York as Nelsons (who also leads the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Germany) is foreign to Boston. Everything about Dudamel’s appointment as music and artistic director, including its emphasis on finding venues outside Lincoln Center, tacitly acknowledges that the Philharmonic has long lacked effective leadership. In fact, not since Leonard Bernstein’s fabled decade as music director has it successfully pursued a consolidated purpose.
It bears stressing that Bernstein did not concurrently preside over another orchestra. During his first season (1958-59), he led 18 weeks of subscription concerts (notably incorporating a “general survey of American music from the earliest generations of American composers to the present”), plus numerous young people’s concerts and 36 concerts on tour abroad. The remainder of the subscription season was shared by only six guest conductors (a stellar list including Herbert von Karajan), each assigned multiple weeks.
The Philharmonic’s 2026-27 subscription series, by comparison, features no fewer than 19 conductors, with Dudamel in charge for only eight weeks. But his programs are creative. And he has already led a memorable premiere: David Lang’s oratorio “the wealth of nations,” a composition that demonstrates how new symphonic music can be clever, original and timely. Setting texts by Adam Smith, Frederick Douglass and Eugene V. Debs, it bears witness to today’s fraught American experience without preaching or prescribing.
At the Metropolitan Opera, the company’s well-documented financial challenges are compounded by issues of artistic planning. Göran Gentele, Rudolf Bing’s successor as general manager in 1972, had he not died in an automobile accident, could have made a difference. His most farsighted priority was a planned mini-Met. The company’s 3,800-seat Lincoln Center home, he realized, craved big voices that no longer existed. And he knew that a refreshed repertoire would demand a more intimate alternative space. Today’s cavernous Met struggles to fill seats with overrated midcult products that cannot possibly endure. Changing times generate changing needs and circumstances.
Eager to Innovate? Go West
West Coast institutions of classical music have long been more open to experimentation. During the directorship of Speight Jenkins, from 1983 to 2014, the Seattle Opera displaced the Met as the leading North American venue for Wagner. He would not have commissioned the vapid, high-tech “Ring” with which Robert Lepage burdened the Met in recent years. Jenkins shrank the Seattle house and enhanced its acoustics. He was omnipresent in the lobbies. He stressed world-class “Ring” lectures, four-hour “Ring” symposiums and a serious bookstore. He introduced English supertitles long before the Met began translating Wagner for its audiences.
In Los Angeles, Ernest Fleischmann rethought the Los Angeles Philharmonic and engaged Frank Gehry to build Walt Disney Concert Hall — which, in its third decade, continues to entice capacity audiences with dramatic sightlines and crystalline acoustics. The orchestra’s current leadership team evinces both continuity and an eagerness to innovate. Dudamel, as departing music and artistic director, will become artistic and cultural laureate. Esa-Pekka Salonen, who preceded Dudamel, will become creative director. The composer John Adams is the creative chair, and Herbie Hancock is the creative chair for jazz. Daniel Harding is the incoming music director. Though this profusion of titles has excited ridicule, it doubtless negates business as usual.
Up the coast, the Oakland Symphony enjoys a remarkably multiethnic, intergenerational audience — a legacy of Michael Morgan, who served as music director for three decades until his death in 2021. Morgan’s omnipresence in the community defined his tenure. That is why you will even now find his picture displayed on the walls of the city’s public high schools.
Cultivating Community in the Midwest
In the Midwest, the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra (for which, full disclosure, I serve as scholar in residence) likewise fulfills the credo pronounced long ago by Theodore Thomas when he crusaded for symphonic music across the United States: “A symphony orchestra shows the culture of the community, not opera.”
In fact, the concert orchestra, to a remarkable degree, proved an American invention — a civic hub comparable to the opera house abroad. The South Dakota Symphony enjoys a music director, Delta David Gier, who moved to Sioux Falls 22 years ago and has raised a family there. Gier has at all times insisted that an orchestra aspire to serve a specific community in specific ways. His signature initiative is the Lakota Music Project, which binds the orchestra to Native American reservations throughout the state. Beyond that, all the proposals now controversial in Boston, including thematic festivals and “affinity programing,” have already been implemented in Sioux Falls.
Do the South Dakota Symphony musicians, in Eagle Hawk’s words, “feel it”? The orchestra maintains a nine-member, full-time core consisting of a string quartet and wind quintet, both self-governing. They perform more than 100 times per season. At the Pine Ridge or Rosebud reservations, they play with Lakota drummers and singers, and mentor young musical aspirants. The remainder of the orchestra’s members, many of whom come from the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, are self-selecting: They do not trek to Sioux Falls for the income, but are enticed by the repertoire, which is brave, and the vibe, which is exhilarating.
The history of the Lakota Music Project tracks the South Dakota Symphony’s larger trajectory. It is an exercise in building trust and mutual understanding. Early on, the symphony members and the Porcupine Singers would play for each other. Personal and musical relationships evolved. Then there were fledgling attempts to make music together. The most recent Lakota Music Project tour, last October, premiered two compositions: one by Jeffrey Paul, the orchestra’s extraordinary principal oboist, and one by Bermel, with whom I conferred about those Met Opera broadcasts. The performers included symphony musicians alongside Pine Ridge’s Creekside Singers and the Dakota flutist Bryan Akipa.
In both pieces, elements of Native American and Western classical music merged triumphantly. Bermel has recast his composition to include the entire South Dakota Symphony; it premieres in November as part of a two-week festival considering “Native American inspirations” in classical music, beginning with Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony (accompanied by visuals exploring his indebtedness to Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha”). Given the intellectual heft of this exercise, tracking the “Indianist” movement Dvorak inspired and its more recent aftermath, the festival will reach beyond the concert hall not only to local high schools, but to classrooms and concerts at four universities in four South Dakota cities.
I cannot imagine a more promising musical celebration of the United States at 250.
For a book-length treatment of this topic, there’s my “Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall.”
There is more classical music being performed in more places than ever before. The orchestras of Pittsburgh and Baltimore, for example are first rate. There is opera in more places than ever before.
By highlighting Boston, New York, South Dakota, and the West Coast, the author provides a very narrow assessment of classical music in America.
The article is remarkable. The author is drawing a path, with a handful of landmark examples, not an inventory of current orchestras across the land.
Let’s praise the youth orchestras around our country. Kids are learning to play instruments, concentrate in ensembles, and build lifelong friendships and musical interests. And repertoire is expanding… love the classics, and also the fiddle tunes, blues and jazz, civil rights songs, spirituals. When you make music with younger folks you find hope.
I always find Mr. Horowitz’s writings thoughtful, although I must largely disagree with him and agree with the other posts on this subject. I teach at a university, and our students are finding numerous creative ways to keep classical music in the forefront and broaden its appeal. I’m in a Midwestern city with an excellent symphony, multiple community orchestras, choirs, chamber ensembles, and soloists, as well as surprisingly strong philanthropic support, so classical music is everywhere. The orchestra plays too much music by the same few composers (in my opinion), but we have a new music director who promises to shake things up a bit. I’m aware that this isn’t the case everywhere, but people have been predicting the demise of classical music for centuries, and we’re still here.
And as for Ives not getting his due, there were multiple celebrations across the U.S. (including some where Mr. Horowitz was a featured guest!), including one very recently in Georgia. His anniversary has spawned some great new reissues and recordings as well, so I’m not convinced that Ives was celebrated more in Germany than in the U.S. Ives will always be a harder sell due to the diversity of his music, but that doesn’t mean he’s ignored. The same symphony orchestra I mentioned in my home city even took two movements from the *Holidays Symphony* on a European tour!
Finally, I would echo Carlo’s point that a lot of the innovation and creative work is done outside the big orchestras and major cities, so we shouldn’t always look there for guidance on trends. The South Dakota Symphony and Maestro Gier recently mounted an excellent performance of Douglas Moore’s obscure Pulitzer Prize–winning opera *Giants in the Earth*—it was exciting and filled an important lacuna. Many similar projects can be found all across the country.
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. I must vehemently disagree with everything you say in your latest article . Classical music in America is NOT
“declining ” . It is evolving just as it has been from the beginning ..
Yes, our symphony orchestras and opera companies face serious problems , but these are not insurmountable and I still hear no evidence from old recordings that the overall quality of performances today is as inferior to those of the alleged “golden age “as you insist .
The repertoire of American classical music is actually more DIVERSE than ever before . The beloved old standard European classical masterpieces are still popular , but they are popular because of their high quality and universal appeal to audiences , They will always be popular , and every year , people of various ages , not only children ,, discover them and become devotees of classical music for the first time in their lives ..
There is absolutely no lack of works by American composers pastor present today , including more works by black and female composers than ever before . Of course, most new music today will be quickly forgotten , but but this has always been the case .
Standards of orchestral playing are actually higher than ever before , and there are also far more world class orchestras in the US than ever before . The term “big five orchestras ” has been obsolete for many years ..
I have not yet attended any live performances by the Boston symphony under Andris Nelsons but would very much like to .
However the Deutsche Grammophon recordings I have heard and the telecasts I have experienced have revealed to me the very best playing I have ever heard by them !
,and I have heard recordings etc by them ranging all the was from Koussevitzktky , Monteux , Munch and other BSO music directors and and countless guest conductors on the WQXR radio broadcasts .
The repertoire of the Metropolitan opera is now more interesting and diverse than ever before , and its orchestra is a miraculous ensemble which can adjust its sound and style to fit the music of any opera composer like a chameleon .
And there are far more outstanding opera singers today than your article would have us believe ,
“I must vehemently disagree with everything you say” is not an argument; it is a declaration of principles that closes the door it pretends to open. Fortunately, what follows reveals more — and much of it concedes Horowitz’s case.
You say classical music in America is not declining. I would answer that decline and evolution are not opposites: decline is one of the forms evolution takes; it always moves forward. Nor is the “golden age” Horowitz’s invention or insistence — it is a framing device, the way we speak of the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema. Such terms are not a cancellation of what came after; they are how we catalog the past in order to understand it. The same is true of the “Big Five”: obsolete as a ranking, perhaps, but still a cardinal reference — a shared canon that lets the conversation continue.
You note that the European masterpieces endure because of their quality and universal appeal. That is precisely Horowitz’s point. You celebrate that more works by Black and female composers are programmed than ever before. Good — that has been Horowitz’s quest for thirty years and is clearly stated in hisDvořák’s Prophecy.
As for the Met and the BSO: your praise contests nothing Horowitz wrote. His assessment is an invitation to improve further, and we should embrace such criticism rather than take offense. The article was not written to make anyone believe anything. It was written to inspire critical thinking — which, judging by your comment, it did. Respectfully, EMB
Dear Joe,
Off the record from a simple street guy……., I think Classical Music in America at 250 is one of the greatest artistic failures of our time. We have failed to nurture our own indigenous musical voice.
The last time America truly had a distinctive orchestral sound was with composers like George Gershwin, whose music reflected the syncopation, rhythm, optimism, and energy of American life. His orchestral works captured the sound of a nation coming into its own.
Our cities pulse with jazz, hip-hop, Latin music, rock, electronic music, and countless hybrid forms. If America is going to have a living classical tradition, it must absorb those rhythms and that vitality rather than pretend they do not exist.
It seems like the job of USA orchestras is preserving eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European culture. There is nothing wrong with that. But where is our culture?
If American classical music had been allowed to develop naturally, it might have continued the lineage of Gershwin—with richer harmonies, greater complexity, and new orchestral colors—but still unmistakably American. Instead, too much contemporary music is written inside academic institutions for other academics, with almost no relationship to the real world.
Even hip-hop, whether one likes it or not, is an honest reflection of urban America. It mirrors the language, rhythms, and pulse of contemporary life. That is exactly what serious art has always done.
Part of the problem is institutional. The people running many orchestras come from a very narrow cultural perspective. They often favor works that align with European bourgeois sensibilities while overlooking music that genuinely reflects America’s own identity.
Then there is performance practice. To the best of my knowledge, there are very few conductors that run these orchestras who grew up immersed in the rhythmic language of jazz and American vernacular music. ( do we have one american condutor running a lare USA orchestra ? If you put a score that really swings in front of Klaus Mäkelä, would he understand it the way Dave Taylor would? Jazz is not merely notation—it is a language. It lives in the body. It is part of our DNA like Samba is to a Brazilian.
Likewise, many orchestras simply are not even trained to play this music authentically. They can imitate it, they can dabble in it, but a page of syncopated sixteenth- and eighth-note figures written with genuine groove requires a completely different musical instinct. Conservatories rarely teach it because, frankly, they are not interested in it as students graduate to perpetuate the teachings of the classical orchestra church.
Ironically, I believe AI may become one of the greatest tools for creating a truly American classical voice. It will allow composers to synthesize the countless musical languages that make up our culture and transform them into something entirely new and circumventing these large institutions set on preserving the past.
Art should reflect the world around us. Instead, much of today’s contemporary classical music seems driven more by institutional politics and social engineering than by artistic necessity. The result is music that often feels intellectually fashionable but emotionally weightless.
You may hate my music. That’s perfectly fine. But at least it comes from somewhere real. It will hit you over the head because it is rooted in the sounds of the NYC streets I live on. And you may not like Dave Taylor’s playing, but his sound is one hundred percent New York jazz. That cannot be manufactured inside an institution. It comes from living it. And like him or hate him, its more real and reflective of our times than any orchestra in this country.
Best,
David