Word: horowitz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...HOROWITZ, AS can be seen, offers a panoramic view of American musical life and pulls no punches about his own beliefs (the New York Philharmonic, he says, plays with "less sustained intensity" than the New York Rangers...
Toscanini's viscerally exciting performances, wrought with supreme tension and instrumental clarity, though sometimes sacrificing musical depth, also account for his popularity, according to Horowitz. Here Horowitz invokes the theories of Theodor Adorno, a Marxist of the Frankfurt school. Adorno, Horowitz writes, understood culture of the "bourgeois epoch"--"affirmative" and "official"--as neglecting the contradictions inherent in great art. Although proponents claimed classical would lead to universal enlightenment, "aspects of the concert hall experience were standardized, atomized, `fetishized,'" by alienated members of a "commodity society...
TOSCANINI WAS an important part of the fetishization of music, Horowitz concludes, because his style, far from being suited to all types of music, cut all of it in the same, popularly appealing mold--that of the visceral music of Guiseppe Verdi, Toscanini's countryman, friend, and deepest musical love...
More importantly, according to Horowitz, Toscanini's repertoire was restricted, especially in his later years, to what we now know as standard repertoire...
...Toscanini had conducted more modern works, more American works, Horowitz suggests, then perhaps classical music would not be as ossified as it is today, with young performers playing the same, standard works dating from earlier centuries. Toscanini, for Horowitz, was more than just a product of his times. He was also a formative influence on the American musical scene of his time and ours...