Mr. Horowitz writes powerfully and with enviable authority. In examining Thomson’s views, he discusses Van Wyck Brooks’s ideas about a 'usable past.' He connects Ives’s use of vernacular musical sources in the composer’s third symphony with Mark Twain’s use of vernacular speech in Huckleberry Finn. He bolsters his treatment of musical nostalgia by considering nostalgic elements in the paintings of John Singer Sargent. Possibly Mr. Horowitz overrates Ives and underrates Copland, but his positions are always clearly staked out and amply supported ... Horowitz helps us appreciate what treasures we do have.

The book is a timely contribution to our growing national recognition that this type of exclusion characterizes most aspects of American culture ... Against the specter of American racism, Horowitz takes a nuanced look at why Dvorak’s prediction did not come true ... Horowitz, a serious educator, takes his mission seriously. Yet I am concerned that Dvorak’s Prophecy presumes a level of knowledge that many readers will not have and that its meanderings may be difficult to access, even for those steeped in classical music. On the other hand, the book is a sincere and erudite effort to right ignorance and wrongs, and to bring this long-forgotten music into the sunlight.

... it mostly appeals to aesthetic and historical debates about the meaning of 'Black classical music,' resulting in the glaring omission of racism as a structural force with profound effects for individuals ... Despite Horowitz’s earlier attention to an excessive devotion to masterworks, Dvořák’s Prophecy often reads as a jeremiad on the rapidly fading relevance of singular grand narratives ... Much of Dvořák’s Prophecy offers breezy reflections on various Gilded Age touchstones ... In an obvious oversight, Horowitz’s loose conflation of Eurocentrism with whiteness and Americanism with Blackness doesn’t account for racist double standards routinely applied to African American musicians ... Horowitz’s failure to account for these more subtle dimensions of racism aren’t born of ignorance: he excuses himself from doing so with a highly selective use of evidence ... Horowitz’s nonchalance, rooted in meager evidence, severely injures his credibility as an interpreter of racial history ... Horowitz transforms Blackness into an abstract aesthetic category divorced from human bodies ... Horowitz, in short, is simply out of his depth when discussing interracial cultural exchanges ... Ultimately, Dvořák’s Prophecy thus wraps its author’s artistic tastes in an old, loose-fitting historical costume now slightly more tailored to racial concerns.

Along with a classical-music world that has historically shunned African American composers and performers, Horowitz sees a falsely held American 'pastlessness' that ignores the depth and breadth of the 'sorrow songs' of America’s slaves, a pastlessness that, internalized even by the likes of Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland, and Leonard Bernstein, has deprived the musical world of a truly vernacular American classical music. It’s certainly a provocative claim, and Horowitz’s narrative, informed as it is, isn’t the easiest to track. Still, the full manifestation of Dvořák’s vision is thrilling to consider.

Horowitz is unafraid to tackle the third-rail issue of cultural appropriation, coming down firmly on the side of artists’ freedom to draw on any traditions that speak to them ... Horowitz closes with a clarion call for American classical music to 'acquire a viable future, at last buoyed and directed by a proper past.' His chronicle of 'a failure of historical memory' is feisty and opinionated but always backed by solid evidence. Essential cultural history.

... [a] knotty cultural history ... Rife with murky pronouncements...much of the book is a tart polemic against 20th-century critics and composers including Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland for embracing a snooty modernism and for their 'Oedipal' dismissal of forerunners who blended classical and vernacular music. Unfortunately, Horowitz’s preoccupation with long-forgotten, avant-garde critical controversies make this interpretation of America’s protean musical development feel dated.