Joseph Horowitz writes in Moral Fire: "If the Met’s screaming Wagnerites standing on chairs (in the 1890s) are unthinkable today, it is partly because we mistrust high feeling. Our children avidly specialize in vicarious forms of electronic interpersonal diversion. Our laptops and televisions ensnare us in a surrogate world that shuns all but facile passions; only Jon Stewart and Bill Maher share moments of moral outrage disguised as comedy." Arguing that the past can prove instructive and inspirational, Horowitz revisits four astonishing personalities—Henry Higginson, Laura Langford, Henry Krehbiel and Charles Ives—whose missionary work in the realm of culture signaled a belief in the fundamental decency of civilized human nature, in the universality of moral values, and in progress toward a kingdom of peace and love.
As never before or since, Richard Wagner's name dominated American music-making at the close of the nineteenth century. Europe, too, was obsessed with Wagner, but—as Joseph Horowitz shows in this first history of Wagnerism in the United States—the American obsession was unique. The central figure in Wagner Nights is conductor Anton Seidl (1850-1898), a priestly and enigmatic personage in New York musical life. Seidl's own admirers included the women of the Brooklyn-based Seidl Society, who wore the letter "S" on their dresses. In the summers, Seidl conducted fourteen times a week at Brighton Beach, filling the three-thousand-seat music pavilion to capacity. The fact that most Wagnerites were women was a distinguishing feature of American Wagnerism and constituted a vital aspect of the fin-de-siècle ferment that anticipated the New American Woman. Drawing on the work of such cultural historians as T. Jackson Lears and Lawrence Levine, Horowitz's lively history reveals an "Americanized" Wagner never documented before. An entertaining and startling read, a treasury of operatic lore, Wagner Nights offers an unprecedented revisionist history of American culture a century ago. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.
As America's symbol of Great Music, Arturo Toscanini and the "masterpieces" he served were regarded with religious awe. As a celebrity personality, he was heralded for everything from his unwavering stance against Hitler and Mussolini and his cataclysmic tantrums, to his "democratic" penchants for television wrestling and soup for dinner. During his years with the Metropolitan Opera (1908-15) and the New York Philharmonic (1926-36) he was regularly proclaimed the "world's greatest conductor ." And with the NBC Symphony (1937-54), created for him by RCA's David Sarnoff, he became the beneficiary of a voracious multimedia promotional apparatus that spread Toscanini madness nationwide. According to Life, he was as well-known as Joe Dimaggio; Time twice put him on its cover; and the New York Herald Tribune attributed Toscanini's fame to simple recognition of his unique "greatness." In this boldly conceived and superbly realized study, Joseph Horowitz reveals how and why Toscanini became the object of unparalleled veneration in the United States. Combining biography, cultural history, and music criticism, Horowitz explores the cultural and commercial mechanisms that created America's Toscanini cult and fostered, in turn, a Eurocentric, anachronistic new audience for old music.
The perils of equating notions of freedom with artistic vitality Eloquently extolled by President John F. Kennedy, the idea that only artists in free societies can produce great art became a bedrock assumption of the Cold War. That this conviction defied centuries of historical evidence--to say nothing of achievements within the Soviet Union--failed to impact impregnable cultural Cold War doctrine. Joseph Horowitz writes: “That so many fine minds could have cheapened freedom by over-praising it, turning it into a reductionist propaganda mantra, is one measure of the intellectual cost of the Cold War.” He shows how the efforts of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom were distorted by an anti-totalitarian “psychology of exile” traceable to its secretary general, the displaced Russian aristocrat/composer Nicolas Nabokov, and to Nabokov’s hero Igor Stravinsky. In counterpoint, Horowitz investigates personal, social, and political factors that actually shape the creative act. He here focuses on Stravinsky, who in Los Angeles experienced a “freedom not to matter,” and Dmitri Shostakovich, who was both victim and beneficiary of Soviet cultural policies. He also takes a fresh look at cultural exchange and explores paradoxical similarities and differences framing the popularization of classical music in the Soviet Union and the United States. In closing, he assesses the Kennedy administration’s arts advocacy initiatives and their pertinence to today’s fraught American national identity. Challenging long-entrenched myths, The Propaganda of Freedom newly explores the tangled relationship between the ideology of freedom and ideals of cultural achievement.
An award-winning scholar and leading authority on American symphonic culture argues that classical music in the United States is peculiarly performance-driven, and he traces a musical trajectory rising to its peak at the close of the 19th century and receding after World War I.
Vivid conversations with Claudio Arrau on technique, plus discussions with Philip Lorenz, Daniel Barenboim, Garrick Ohlsson, and Sir Colin Davis. "A fascinating and valuable book." — New York Magazine. 21 photos.
A former New York Times music critic and award-winning author describes the contributions of the stage and film master director to Gershwin's classic American folk opera that originally premiered in 1935.
You Are As Your Mind Is Like few other voices of the past century, minister and New Thought pioneer Joseph Murphy gave us an entirely new sense of human potential and power. The secret of creation, Murphy taught, is within your own thoughts. Now, popular spiritual voice and PEN Award-winning historian Mitch Horowitz collects some of Murphy's most powerful and least-known writings into this dynamic collection. Mitch's historical introduction and commentary highlight Murphy's ideas in a way that provides the perfect introduction for newcomers and a fresh window on the teacher's thought for longtime readers. Mitch's timeline at the end of the book offers the first truly clarifying and reliable tracking of Murphy's remarkable career. The Wisdom of Joseph Murphy features: This Is It: The Art of Metaphysical Demonstration (1945) Fear Not (1946) The Meaning of Reincarnation (1954) Believe In Yourself (1955) Stay Young Forever (1958) Nuclear Religion (1961) Why Did This Happen to Me? (1962)
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 A provocative interpretation of why classical music in America "stayed white"—how it got to be that way and what can be done about it. In 1893 the composer Antonín Dvorák prophesied a “great and noble school” of American classical music based on the “negro melodies” he had excitedly discovered since arriving in the United States a year before. But while Black music would foster popular genres known the world over, it never gained a foothold in the concert hall. Black composers found few opportunities to have their works performed, and white composers mainly rejected Dvorák’s lead. Joseph Horowitz ranges throughout American cultural history, from Frederick Douglass and Huckleberry Finn to George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and the work of Ralph Ellison, searching for explanations. Challenging the standard narrative for American classical music fashioned by Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, he looks back to literary figures—Emerson, Melville, and Twain—to ponder how American music can connect with a “usable past.” The result is a new paradigm that makes room for Black composers, including Harry Burleigh, Nathaniel Dett, William Levi Dawson, and Florence Price, while giving increased prominence to Charles Ives and George Gershwin. Dvorák’s Prophecy arrives in the midst of an important conversation about race in America—a conversation that is taking place in music schools and concert halls as well as capitols and boardrooms. As George Shirley writes in his foreword to the book, “We have been left unprepared for the current cultural moment. [Joseph Horowitz] explains how we got there [and] proposes a bigger world of American classical music than what we have known before. It is more diverse and more equitable. And it is more truthful.”
During the first half of the twentieth century—decades of war and revolution in Europe—an "intellectual migration" relocated thousands of artists and thinkers to the United States, including some of Europe's supreme performing artists, filmmakers, playwrights, and choreographers. For them, America proved to be both a strange and opportune destination. A "foreign homeland" (Thomas Mann), it would frustrate and confuse, yet afford a clarity of understanding unencumbered by native habit and bias. However inadvertently, the condition of cultural exile would promote acute inquiries into the American experience. What impact did these famous newcomers have on American culture, and how did America affect them? George Balanchine, in collaboration with Stravinsky, famously created an Americanized version of Russian classical ballet. Kurt Weill, schooled in Berlin jazz, composed a Broadway opera. Rouben Mamoulian's revolutionary Broadway productions of Porgy and Bess and Oklahoma! drew upon Russian "total theater." An army of German filmmakers—among them F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, and Billy Wilder—made Hollywood more edgy and cosmopolitan. Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich redefined film sexuality. Erich Korngold upholstered the sound of the movies. Rudolf Serkin inspirationally inculcated dour Germanic canons of musical interpretation. An obscure British organist reinvented himself as "Leopold Stokowski." However, most of these gifted émigrés to the New World found that the freedoms they enjoyed in America diluted rather than amplified their high creative ambitions. A central theme of Joseph Horowitz's study is that Russians uprooted from St. Petersburg became "Americans"—they adapted. Representatives of Germanic culture, by comparison, preached a German cultural bible—they colonized. "The polar extremes," he writes, "were Balanchine, who shed Petipa to invent a New World template for ballet, and the conductor George Szell, who treated his American players as New World Calibans to be taught Mozart and Beethoven." A symbiotic relationship to African American culture is another ongoing motif emerging from Horowitz's survey: the immigrants "bonded with blacks from a shared experience of marginality"; they proved immune to "the growing pains of a young high culture separating from parents and former slaves alike.
In this book, Joseph Citron offers the first comprehensive analysis of Prague Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz’s (c.1565-c.1626) magnum opus of Jewish ethical literature, the Shnei Luhot Ha-Berit. Citron’s close philological analysis reveals the pioneering nature of the work in creating an organic Jewish theological system rooted in the mystical structures of Kabbalah, cultivating an orthodoxy in thought and legal practice based upon its principles. It provided a platform for laypeople to attain great spiritual heights by emphasising that God could be served and cleaved to through mundane activity, and that Judaism demanded deep emotion and joy as much as Talmudic erudition or meticulous observance. The Shelah's paradigms significantly influenced 17th-century Sabbatean movement, the 18th-century Hasidic movement, and Jewish Orthodoxy in the 19th century. The book is essential for scholars and laypeople alike wishing to understand the evolution of Judaism in Central and Eastern Europe in the early modern period.
The Classic of Empowered Living, Now in a Special Concise Edition! Do you sense the existence of a greater power inside you? You are right. You will discover your true potential in this unique abridgement of the masterwork of higher living: Joseph Murphy's The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. This thorough but compact condensation exposes you, in an unforgettable forty minutes, to the methods, principles, and exercises you can use right now to harness your subconscious mind for achievement, wellness, and success. Learn: How to find answers to problems while you sleep. How your inner talking becomes reality. The secret to effective prayer. The right use of visualizations and affirmations. How to escape self-limiting patterns of the past. Condensed and introduced by PEN Award-winning historian Mitch Horowitz, this brief volume will broaden how you see yourself and your possibilities. Discover what millions have found in The Power of Your Subconscious Mind.
In this book, Joseph Citron offers the first comprehensive analysis of Prague Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz’s (c.1565-c.1626) magnum opus of Jewish ethical literature, the Shnei Luhot Ha-Berit. Citron’s close philological analysis reveals the pioneering nature of the work in creating an organic Jewish theological system rooted in the mystical structures of Kabbalah, cultivating an orthodoxy in thought and legal practice based upon its principles. It provided a platform for laypeople to attain great spiritual heights by emphasising that God could be served and cleaved to through mundane activity, and that Judaism demanded deep emotion and joy as much as Talmudic erudition or meticulous observance. The Shelah's paradigms significantly influenced 17th-century Sabbatean movement, the 18th-century Hasidic movement, and Jewish Orthodoxy in the 19th century. The book is essential for scholars and laypeople alike wishing to understand the evolution of Judaism in Central and Eastern Europe in the early modern period.
Joseph Horowitz's The Post-Classical Predicament explores the dilemma of classical music in America's changing society. Around the turn of the century, argues the author, classical music was integral to general intellectual discourse and to the contemporary moment. This integration of music and society began to break down during the interwar decades. A new, enlarged audience was tutored to disdain contemporary and American culture in favor of pedigreed Old World masters. In a period when jazz became America's most individual, most influential musical export, the music appreciation movement shunned popular music as a menace. To the schism between musical and intellectual life, between audience and composer, was added a schism between highbrow and low. After World War II classical music became increasingly marginalized - a form of popular culture masquerading as high culture. Ultimately, great music and great performers became captives of their own celebrity. In this sterling collection of essays, Joseph Horowitz ranges from the turn-of-the-century achievements of Dvorak, Seidl, and Ives to the distorted careers of Vladimir Horowitz and Leonard Bernstein a century later. His other topics include Glenn Gould, Amadeus, and Forest Lawn Cemetery - where classical music rests in peace as mortuary kitsch. The collection concludes with the author's reflections on his own experience as Executive Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra - whose recent weekend festivals aim for a revitalized "post-classical" music exploding the traditional formats and boundaries.
Combining biography, cultural history, and music criticism, the author explores the cultural and commercial mechanisms that aided in the formation of the Toscanini legend and reveals Toscanini himself as a musicians' icon
As America's symbol of Great Music, Arturo Toscanini and the "masterpieces" he served were regarded with religious awe. As a celebrity personality, he was heralded for everything from his unwavering stance against Hitler and Mussolini and his cataclysmic tantrums, to his "democratic" penchants for television wrestling and soup for dinner. During his years with the Metropolitan Opera (1908-15) and the New York Philharmonic (1926-36) he was regularly proclaimed the "world's greatest conductor ." And with the NBC Symphony (1937-54), created for him by RCA's David Sarnoff, he became the beneficiary of a voracious multimedia promotional apparatus that spread Toscanini madness nationwide. According to "Life," he was as well-known as Joe Dimaggio; "Time" twice put him on its cover; and the "New York Herald Tribune" attributed Toscanini's fame to simple recognition of his unique "greatness." In this boldly conceived and superbly realized study, Joseph Horowitz reveals how and why Toscanini became the object of unparalleled veneration in the United States. Combining biography, cultural history, and music criticism, Horowitz explores the cultural and commercial mechanisms that created America's Toscanini cult and fostered, in turn, a Eurocentric, anachronistic new audience for old music.
The Classic of Empowered Living, Now in a Special Concise Edition! Do you sense the existence of a greater power inside you? You are right. You will discover your true potential in this unique abridgement of the masterwork of higher living: Joseph Murphy’s The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. In less than an hour of reading, this thorough but compact condensation exposes you to principles and exercises you can use right now to harness your subconscious mind for achievement, wellness, and success. Learn: • How to find answers to problems while you sleep. • How your inner talking becomes reality. • The secret to effective prayer. • The right use of visualizations and affirmations. • How to escape self-limiting patterns of the past. • The incredible, unbounded abilities of your subconscious. Condensed and introduced by PEN Award-winning historian Mitch Horowitz, this brief volume will broaden how you see yourself and your possibilities. Discover what millions have found in The Power of Your Subconscious Mind.
Are You Ready to Discover Who You Truly Are? Healthful self-belief is the single greatest determinant of success. But so many of us lack it. In The Secret Formula, Joseph Murphy, author of the groundbreaking classic The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, reveals the hidden key to bolstering your sense of self: realizing the infinite powers of your mind. The simple, persuasive, and epic pieces assembled in this collection provide a spiritual and psychological blueprint—a “secret formula”—to discovering the metaphysical power of your thoughts and your mind’s connection to the highest creative principle of the universe. When you discover this esoteric truth, you will finally know and be able to live out who you really are. This collection, part of a new series called Joseph Murphy’s Golden Lessons, is edited by popular voice of esoteric spirituality Mitch Horowitz. It includes Mitch’s short bio of Murphy and a timeline of the teacher’s life. “Your subconscious is, in large measure, your destiny,” Mitch writes in his introduction. “And your destiny can be shaped.” The methods in The Secret Formulashow you how.
The Unparalleled Classic on the Powers of Your Mind--For the First Time in a Gender Neutral Edition! The Power of Your Subconscious Mind will mark a turning point in your life: Joseph Murphy's landmark reveals the hidden source of everything you experience--the thoughts and mental images impressed upon your subconscious. This classic has enthralled readers, and changed countless lives, since it appeared in 1963. Now, for the first time, the complete book is available in this special gender-neutral edition, edited and introduced by PEN Award-winning historian Mitch Horowitz. Mitch deftly brings antiquated terms and gender references in line with current standards, while preserving the full range of Joseph Murphy's ideas, examples, and methods. Mitch's new introduction highlights the dynamism of Murphy's ideas, and how to use them for maximum benefit. Discover: - The one secret behind every religion. - How to harness your innate healing powers. - Why some people appear born lucky. - How your thoughts attract and repel money. - The incredible power of faith. - How your mind connects with Infinite Intelligence. - How your subconscious aids you while you sleep. - How the quieting of the mind unleashes remarkable powers.
YOU ARE MORE POWERFUL THAN YOU’VE EVER REALIZED We are raised to believe in strict limits on who we are. But there is a greater truth—and a greater you. In Your Super Powers!, Joseph Murphy, the groundbreaking author of The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, teaches you how to take a whole new measure of your abilities. You have no limits. Murphy writes, other than those imposed by your thoughts: new ideas are transformative power that reshape your existence. In seven selected writings, Murphy reveals the powers of your mind waiting to be refined, honed, and used, so that you can knowingly shape your world, rather than be shaped by chronic, rambling, and runaway thoughts. The very hunger that you feel for change is what sets your self-discovery in motion. This collection, part of a new series called Joseph Murphy’s Golden Lessons, is edited and introduced by popular voice of esoteric spirituality Mitch Horowitz. It includes Mitch’s short bio of Murphy and a timeline of the teacher’s life. “Desire, need, hunger—do you feel these things right now”, Mitch askes in his introduction. “You must if you picked up this book. Good. Those are the impulses that summon you to your super-self.”
“IDEAS ARE YOUR MASTERS” In The Magic Keys, Joseph Murphy reveals the hidden truth of life. You—and all the world—are ruled by ideas. Once you discover the methods to master ideas, you master yourself and everything around you. In eight enticing steps, the author of The Power of Your Subconscious Mind teaches you how to harness and transform your ideas in all areas of life, including money, health, relationships, worry, and the wish for security. Murphy also explores “the fourth way to pray”—a dramatic yet simple method that opens you to a new world of possibility. This collection, part of a new series called Joseph Murphy’s Golden Lessons, is edited and introduced by popular voice of esoteric spirituality Mitch Horowitz. It includes Mitch’s short bio of Murphy and a timeline of the teacher’s life. “Ideas of self-image,” Mitch writes in his introduction, “shape your existence.” Allow The Magic Keys to help you realize the full breadth of that truth and how to benefit from it.
Contains a little-known series of legal essays written by Joseph Story for the first edition of the Encyclopedia Americana, edited by Francis Lieber, published in 1844.
Master Your Mind!, a fascinating three-book collection of life-changing classics, will help you find the awesome power within. Joseph Murphy’s classic of bold living, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, shows you your true potential for achievement, wellness, and success. In As a Man Thinketh, James Allen’s beloved meditation on the power of thought, you’ll learn how to transform failure and indirection into dynamism and purpose. Florence Scovel Shinn’s classic The Game of Life and How to Play It illustrates how your words and thoughts, combined with your natural intuitive insights, can bring you prosperity, love, health, and all good things. Abridged and introduced by PEN Award-winning historian Mitch Horowitz, these concise renditions of these classic masterworks will mark a true turning point in your life. Learn: • How to find answers to problems while you sleep. • How to receive hunches and intuitions from your higher mind. • The secret of effective prayer. • How to use affirmations for maximum results. • Why you must be extremely careful in your choice of words. The condensation of these classics can quickly set you on a dramatic and thrilling new direction in life. Escape the self-limiting patters of the past, and release the incredible, unbounded abilities of your subconscious.
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