Here's how to butcher a book about early 20th century American classical music

 Now, I'm not a former music critic of the New York Times, unlike Joseph Horowitz, but when I was a Dallas Symphony Orchestra season-ticket holder years ago, I regularly conversed by email with Dallas Morning News critic Scott Cantrell. And, I've read plenty of in-depth books on various specific composers, histories, etc. Plus, I work in the media business myself, and know something about editing as well as writing.

So, I'm not speaking out of nowhere. First, my expanded-from-Goodreads review of "Artists in Exile," then my comments on how, IMO, this could have been made better.

Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts by Joseph Horowitz
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

One of the best two-star books I’ve read, but, it’s a two star book, in large part due to authorial framing combined with deceptive title.

Loses a star for deceptive title if not more. Not all the classical musicians were exiles and a majority of the film actors and directors were not. Started grokking more by page 250. “Artists” turns out to be selective. Other than briefly referencing Thomas Mann and Vladimir Nabokov as one last attempt to prove his thesis that “Russians” were flexible in exile, Germans not,” no authors are included. No painters or sculptors are included at all, besides a fleeting mention of de Kooning and one other. No architects are included. So, that’s really close to two full stars there. (Yes, he says that in his subtitle, the book is about "performing artists." But, he does mention, if briefly, non-performing artists, and again, Mann and Nabokov are dragged in to push a thesis that IMO isn't tenable.)

Some sort of physical-racialist essentialism by talking about a Balanchine body type that is “itself Africanist.” For a Jewish author writing about people who were, when actually exiles, largely Jewish, this seems dangerous territory.

Claims symphony and opera aren’t frequently revitalized in modern America? Really? Never heard of John Adams? (I’m not a big opera buff, to be honest.)

Stravinsky was in Paris before WWI and wasn’t “expelled.” Balanchine may be considered an economic refugee from 1930s Paris, but wasn’t an exile.

Stravinsky didn’t “capitulate” to Schoenberg. Also, why would an alleged “Germanophobe” regularly visit Weimar Germany?

Balanchine seems used as a foil to beat Stravinsky over the head. Insinuating he was unoriginal by being stimulated by Balanchine after Diaghilev and before Craft.

I didn't care for what seemed to be dissing of Stravinsky's later-life composing work in general. (He deserves fire for any antisemitism, and an epic firefight between Craft and Cal-Berkeley music professor Richard Taruskin shows just how bad it was, while at the same time showing that it can arguably be made even worse than it was.) Being an aficionado of both "Threni" (which may have been borrowed from Krenek's "Lamentatio" with its own serial technique mixed with Renaissance counterpoint that would have grabbed Stravinsky's ear — even he says it might have) and "Abraham and Isaac" (see link above) he wrote some good serial music. Maybe Craft gave him a nudge into that, but I think Stravinsky had long been interested in the idea. Craft discusses that more in an interview.

Having read Craft’s bio (or extended biographies) of Stravinsky, and articles about the Craft-Stravinsky relationship and the bio (a good overview here), let’s just say I’m not totally solid on Horowitz’s thesis.

I’m no more sold, if even as sold, on Horowitz's inflexible Germans and flexible Russians thesis. Perhaps that’s why authors are largely left out, and painters, sculptors and architects totally are; they would upset the thesis. In addition, exiles from places like Francoist Spain (Dali, for one) would further muddy the waters. Add in Duchamp (France) and Mondrian (Netherlands, but in France when he fled for Britain, then the US). I'm sure this would upset the thesis. This is just tagging a few names. To tag another, in music? Darius Milhaud.

Varese was clearly even more than Balanchine not an exile. Boris Aronson wasn’t, either. Rouben Mamoulian MAY have been an exile, but it was from Georgia more than Tsarist Russia per se. Don't forget that Georgia in all of its subsections did not become Russian imperially owned until the late 1820s; ditto for Armenia. So, considering Balanchine and Mamoulian "Russian" is a stretch; Horowitz seems to admit this by calling Mamoulian "deracinated." Of course, he also calls Hungarian Jews "German." Again, there's a thesis at work that he's determined to push, true or false.

Most the actors and directors, although eventually forced to remain in the US during the war years, weren't exiles, either. They freely came to the US in the late 1920s.

A few good things?

Arthur Farwell? Had never heard of him. Through the miracle of YouTube, I played Navajo War Dance No. 2.

Beyond the efforts of WRR every January, had not heard of one-third or more of Black composers mentioned.

That American modern classical music has suffered due to failure to follow Dvorak’s urging to ground itself on Black music is has a fair amount of truth. 

That said, I am not as big of a Dvorak fan as Horowitz appears to be. His American Suite, for example, has some generic descending fourths "American Indian chants." And, I don't think it's as "little-known" as he claims.

Also, jazz, its roots ultimately but not solely African-American, DID have some effect, of no little means, on American classical composers. So, too, in smaller degree, has the blues.

Going beyond Dvorak to the literary, calling James Fenimore Cooper an "Indianist"? Mark Twain is laughing in his grave.

Update: With further thought, I also think Horowitz's sub-thesis, that the "cult of the performer" is purely an American thing, is also overstated. Paganini comes immediately to mind. Joachim, for whom Brahms wrote his violin concerto, next. Liszt, even though composer first, certainly played on the cult of the performer when younger.

View all my reviews

==

OK, now, to make this better? 

First, drop the "Exiles" title. Sometimes, it's an editor or publisher that suggests a book title after not liking the author's, but in this case, I'm sure it was Horowitz.

Second, change that title to something about music, because it's clear that's what it's about.

Third, drop the Germans vs. Russians schtick.

Fourth, simply focus on the development of American classical music from the time of Dvorak's and Mahler's visits on, looking at "native" development, European visits, interactions or lack thereof and more. 

Film, to the degree it involves music scores, and the theater, with musicals and incidental music, comes along for the ride. You semi-ignored literature and totally ignored art and painting, so nothing lost.

Expand by 50 pages. Trim the Balanchine, as that's ballet first. Expand on American-born composers.

Utah no longer Mormon majority

 The LSD Church continues to claim it is, but religious sociology surveys, per the Religious News Service, paint a massively different picture, with the gap between Mormons' own claims and social response surveys having doubled, by percentage points of difference, over the last 30 or so years.

Even more interesting? Utah has dropped to just No. 3, if that, per the RNS piece, in fertility rate. Mormons not making more! The Dakotas are highest, it says (but no link). Guess without any search? American Indian fertility.

Wiki has South Dakota No. 1 as of 2022. Then, Alaska, Nebraska, Louisiana, Utah, North Dakota. Alaska, North Dakota, and probably Nebraska also American Indian births. World Population Review has the two Dakotas, then Alaska and Nebraska, then Utah for 2024. Of note? New Mexico, despite its large American Indian population, is in the bottom one-third of states.

Add to that massive in-migration of non-Mormons and hence the current state of the state.

Catholic Fort Worth Diocese enshrining Padre Pio

Rome loves to talk about how it will "follow the science" on something like evolution by natural selection (with a theistic evolution carve-out for us humans, of course).

It doesn't always.

Ensoulment is of course one biggie.

Then, per the header? This:

Bishop Michael Olson of the Catholic Diocese of Fort Worth announces the dedication of a permanent chapel which will house a first-class relic of Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina who lived a life of deep humility and prayer while performing miracles.

The Saint Pio Chapel dedication will take place on September 18, 2024, at Saint Peter the Apostle Catholic Church, 1201 South Cherry Lane, Fort Worth, Texas. A first-class relic, consisting of a bandage stained with blood from the wound on Saint Pio’s side, will be on display in a reliquary at the parish./

Well, OK now.

 As with John Paul II and other recent cases, the Vatican's sainthood verification process is set up to allegedly allow skeptical questioning, but the results of said questioning then get ignored.

The actual Padre Pio?

Just working off that Wiki link for starters. Stigmata are not supernatural. And such bodily changes aren't limited to Christian intense devotion. There's also the question, per Wiki, about whether he actually had the stigmata or not. And, if he did .... er, why?

There's also the fact that the Vatican itself was skeptical of him for some number of years. He wasn't fully rehabilitated until Pope Paul VI.

Add in, per the book "Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age," that Pio himself, per an uncovered letter, once asked for carbolic acid, which can, of course, be used to create "stigmata."

Now, to world-class skeptic Joe Nickell. He notes that things like "bilocation" claims are all anecdotal. Ditto on claims of healings, which, if they happened, would be easily explained by psychological placebo effect anyway. (See "Rasputin, Grigorii" and "Tsarevitch Alexei.") And, he notes that others have faked stigmata — and later confessed in at least some cases.

Aeon ignores that Walter Kaufmann crushed John Rawls

 At Aeon, John Lefebvre has a paean to Rawls, apparently an extract from his new book "Liberalism is a Way of Life," which is mentioned and linked in the tagline for the author at top left.

Lefebvre ignores that Walter Kaufmann crushed Rawls in "Without Guilt and Justice." Kaufmann doesn't say that's exactly why he wrote the book, but it basically is. Although rejecting both retributive justice and distributive justice, at least as Rawls framed them in his liberal political science ethics, as ultimately being Platonic ideas (which I didn't think of when I read the book the first time) Kaufmann might actually agree with Rawls that life needs to be "graced" or "redeemed," words that clearly come from the Judeo-Christian ethos, even though Rawls became a secularist.

Let's start with Lefebvre:

This raises a tricky question. If you, like me, are unchurched and don’t draw your values from a religion, then where do you get them from? From what broad tradition do you acquire your sense of what is good, normal and worthwhile in life, and – if I can put it this way – your general vibe too?

When I’ve asked my non-religious friends, colleagues and students this question, they’re almost always stumped. Their impulse is to say one of three things: ‘from my experience’, ‘from friends and family’ or ‘from human nature’. But to this I reply, as politely as possible, that those are not suitable answers. Personal experience, friends and family and human nature are situated and formed within wider social, political and cultural contexts. So I ask again: ‘What society-or-civilisation-sized thing can you point to as the source of your values? I’m talking about the kind of thing that, were you Christian, you’d just say: “Ah, the Bible,” or “Oh, my Church.’’’

OK, he's essentially arguing for something transcendental, if not specifically Platonic.

And, then he presents liberalism as just that.

In my book Liberalism as a Way of Life (2024), I argue that the unchurched in the Western world should point to liberalism as the source of who they are through and through. Liberalism – with its core values of personal freedom, fairness, reciprocity, tolerance and irony – is that society-or-civilisation-sized thing that may well underlie who we are, not just in our political opinions but in all walks of life, from the family to the workplace, from friendship to enmity, from humour to outrage, and everything in between.

Oy.

And, yes, I think Lefebvre is presenting liberalism as something Platonic, even if he doesn't recognize that he's doing just that.

It's made worse that the last half of the piece is an extended essay on Rawls' "A Theory of Justice," which is the core of what Kaufmann was refuting. Above all, Kaufmann crushes the Rawlsian ideas of an "original position" and "a veil of ignorance." And, he does so by looking at N=1 or N=2 ethical situations, not classwide or society-wide ones.

Per my long review of Staeley Corngold's bio of Kaufmann, it's called "moral naturalism," Mr. Lefebvre. And, as a philosophy professor, I know that you know that it exists. Moral naturalism is the non-rhetorical answer to the rhetorical question. And yes, your question to your students is rhetorical.

And, given that I'm a streak of reading semi-crappy to crappy philosophy books (of course, Little Bobby Sapolsky's was by choice, knowing it was crappy in advance and wanting to see the train wreck) I have no need of yours, Mr. Lefebvre.