{"id":3537,"date":"2025-05-27T17:14:58","date_gmt":"2025-05-27T21:14:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=3537"},"modified":"2025-06-04T00:41:33","modified_gmt":"2025-06-04T04:41:33","slug":"a-tale-of-two-cities-music-and-race-in-boston-and-new-york","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2025\/05\/a-tale-of-two-cities-music-and-race-in-boston-and-new-york.html","title":{"rendered":"“A Tale of Two Cities” — Music and Race in Boston and New York"},"content":{"rendered":"
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My latest installment<\/a> of \u201cMore than Music<\/a>\u201d on NPR explores racial attitudes in Boston and New York at the turn of the twentieth century. During Antonin Dvorak\u2019s historic American sojourn (1892-95), he was classified by Boston\u2019s music critics as a \u201cSlav\u201d \u2013 a rung below Anglo-Saxons like Beethoven. The leading Boston critic, Philip Hale, also called Dvorak a \u201cnegrophile\u201d and decried his influence on Boston\u2019s leading composer, George Chadwick. Hale considered African-Americans \u201cbarbarians.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As this line of thought \u2013 hierarchizing race \u2013 was once ubiquitous, we may be shocked but unsurprised. It is the New York response to Dvorak that is truly surprising. When New York\u2019s critics assessed Dvorak, racial hierarchies were never invoked. In fact, no less than Dvorak when he espoused \u201cNegro melodies,\u201d many New Yorkers looked to Black America for musical instruction and guidance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was at Manhattan\u2019s Madison Square Garden Concert Hall that Dvorak led an inter-racial orchestra, an all-Black chorus, and two stellar Black soloists in his arrangement of Stephen Foster\u2019s \u201cOld Folks at Home\u201d in 1894. Three years later, William Randolph Hearst rented the Metropolitan Opera House for a fundraiser featuring the Black vaudeville stars Bert Williams and George Walker alongside excerpts from Aida<\/em> and Rigoletto<\/em>. Those events were unthinkable in Boston.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In short: New York was a city of immigrants. In Boston, you were an American if your forebears descended from the Mayflower. My own writings \u2013 in particular, comparing Boston and New York in Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall<\/em> (2005) \u2013 have long explored the surprising fluidity of race in late Gilded Age New York. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A comparable perspective, also sampled on \u201cA Tale of Two Cities,\u201d is detailed in Dale Cockrell\u2019s remarkable 2019 book, Everybody\u2019s Doin\u2019 It — Sex, Music and Dance in New York: 1840 to 1917<\/em>. Cockrell\u2019s methodology was to scour the reports of undercover agents working for a well-heeled vigilante group: The Committee of Fourteen. They infiltrated saloons, hotels, dance halls, and brothels. The \u201cdisorderly behavior\u201d they successfully terminated was specifically inter-racial: music, dancing, and sex. Segregation set in just after World War I. Harlem\u2019s famous Cotton Club, where Black musicians entertained white audiences, was one result. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know where this myth got established,\u201d Cockrell says of Gilded Age stereotypes emphasizing snobbery and privilege. Applied to musical New York, \u201cit\u2019s just wrong.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I remark on NPR: \u201cThe iconic image is Edith Wharton\u2019s account of going to the opera, in her 1920 novel The Age of<\/em>Innocence<\/em> \u2013 a world of snobbery, wealth and fashion. But look again and Wharton is only describing one stratum of the audience at the Academy of Music: the boxholders. We know from other accounts that the Academy\u2019s opera audience was roiling with boisterous Germans and Italians. During intermissions, they would congregate with the singers, amid clouds of cigar smoke and liquor fumes, in a basement lager beer cavern.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To read my \u201cWall Street Journal\u201d review of Dale Cockrell\u2019s book, click <\/em>here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To read a review of \u201cMore than Music\u201d in the Boston Musical Intelligencer, click <\/em>here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LISTENING GUIDE (to hear the show, click here<\/a>):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PART ONE: Dvorak sets “Old Folks at Home” in New York; Music critics hierarchize race in Boston<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PART TWO (12:00) : Celebrating Boston’s George Chadwick — “the most maligned and misunderstood American composer.” [Thomas Wilkins leads the Boston Symphony in Chadwick’s Third Symphony at Tanglewood this summer, on July 20.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PART THREE (29:50) : Boston debates Arthur Nikisch’s Beethoven 5; Dale Cockrell expounds racial fluidity in NYC before WW I<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My latest installment of \u201cMore than Music\u201d on NPR explores racial attitudes in Boston and New York at the turn of the twentieth century. During Antonin Dvorak\u2019s historic American sojourn (1892-95), he was classified by Boston\u2019s music critics as a \u201cSlav\u201d \u2013 a rung below Anglo-Saxons like Beethoven. The leading Boston critic, Philip Hale, also called Dvorak […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3537","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-V3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3537"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3537\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3547,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3537\/revisions\/3547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}