<\/p>
In a relatively short time since the mid-19th century, the United States has developed a distinctive and rich heritage of music performed in concert halls and opera houses around the world. Indigenous songs, spirituals, hymns, popular songs of the prairie, ragtime<\/a>, jazz<\/a> and bluegrass have all added flavour to a recognisable if well-varied style.<\/strong><\/p>\n Another crucial element is America\u2019s internationally renowned film industry, which has nurtured not only specialist composers such as Bernard Herrmann and John Williams<\/a><\/strong> (both of whom have also attempted to make inroads in the concert hall), but also such leading concert hall composers as Aaron Copland<\/a><\/strong>, Leonard Bernstein and John Corigliano. A significant number of Hollywood composers \u2013 such as Korngold<\/a><\/strong>, Steiner, and Waxman \u2013 also represent a broader influx of composers whose parents, or the composers themselves, had fled persecution or repressive regimes, principally Russia (both Tsarist and Soviet) and Nazi Germany.<\/p>\n Some refugees only temporarily settled in America, but nonetheless did their part while in that country to train a talented generation: these composers included Milhaud, Martin\u016f<\/a> <\/strong>and Arnold Schoenberg<\/a><\/strong>, some of whose pupils are included in the following list. Another \u2018foreign\u2019 teacher we should mention is Nadia Boulanger<\/a><\/strong>, a legend among American composers (and composers of other nations) as she taught several generations at The American Conservatory at Fontainebleau (originally established to improve the standard of American band players stationed in France during World War I<\/a><\/strong>) \u2013 including Roy Harris, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Elliott Carter and many others.<\/p>\n So here is a representative selection of composers who have significantly contributed to all that is characteristic and best in \u2018classical\u2019 American music. We suggest at least one recommended recording for each composer \u2013 in some cases, as a bonus, we suggest a second \u2018Something non-mainstream\u2019 which either offers a lesser-known gem by that composer or a different aspect of their style.<\/p>\n Today most widely remembered for his marches, this composer and bandmaster created around a hundred, including\u00a0Liberty Bell <\/em>(1893) and The Stars and Stripes Forever<\/em><\/a><\/strong> (1896). Just a year before writing Liberty Bell<\/em>, Sousa formed his own military band, which toured Europe at least four times and undertook a world tour in 1910-11. It was for his band that the sousaphone \u2013 a type of bass tuba designed to circle the player\u2019s body, so making it more convenient for marching bands \u2013 was invented. Sadly, his band became victim of the Depression in 1931, just a year before its founder\u2019s death. However, Sousa gained further posthumous fame when in the late 1960s the BBC comedy show Monty Python\u2019s Flying Circus <\/em>appropriated Liberty Bell<\/em>\u00a0as its signature tune.<\/p>\n Recommended recording: \u00a0<\/p>\n Almost by any measure \u2013 let alone the fact she was a woman making her career against considerable odds \u2013 Amy Beach is a major composer. A child prodigy, she gave her first public recital aged seven, playing works by Handel, Beethoven and Chopin, as well as her own compositions. When she moved with her family to Boston in 1875, her parents were advised that their eight-year-old daughter could enter a European conservatory. Given her age, they understandably decided to get the best musical education for her closer to home, getting professional training as a pianist, and taking a year of lessons in harmony and counterpoint.<\/p>\n She also effectively taught herself orchestration (working with Berlioz<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s treatise) and fugue.<\/a><\/strong> She made several successful appearances performing with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, though when she married Dr HHA Beach, in deference to her husband\u2019s wishes, she ceased performing. Instead, she devoted herself to composition: in her married years she wrote such major works as the \u2018Gaelic\u2019 Symphony, with its striking wind-swept opening, and her Piano Concerto.<\/p>\n After her husband\u2019s death, Beach went to Europe in 1911 to establish herself both as a composer and performer, impressing German audiences and critics on both counts before she had to return to the States with the outbreak of World War I. Her music, bold and adventurous, absorbed elements from Scottish and Irish folk music. Her String Quartet of 1929, which quotes Inuit themes, was the first work to move away from triadic harmonies in favour of more linear textures with a level of harmonic tension that at times approaches Alban Berg<\/a><\/strong> in its intensity. Today Beach is recognised as the first American woman to achieve success as the composer of large-scale works including symphonies, concertos and choral works \u2013 in all she created more than 300 works in various genres.<\/p>\n Recommended recording: \u00a0<\/p>\n One of the first Afro-American composers to now be widely celebrated, Scott Joplin<\/a><\/strong> started as a pianist in brothels in St Louis and Chicago, where he created the ragtime style \u2013 exemplified by his popular Maple Leaf Rag<\/em>. Joplin registered the copyright of that piece in 1889, so securing a steady if never spectacular income. He used the ragtime style in his opera A Guest of Hono<\/em>r, forming the Scott Joplin Ragtime Opera Co. in 1903 specifically to perform it, opening in St Louis and subsequently toured to five cities. Though admired it was never published, and the music now appears to be lost. But perhaps encouraged by its apparent success, Joplin then wrote a second opera, the three-act Treemonisha<\/em>, completed in 1911 with a piano score published that year. Its single concert performance in Harlem in 1915, with just piano accompaniment, was a flop. Heart-broken, Joplin died just two years later. He and his music almost slipped into obscurity until 1970 when he was rediscovered and championed by the musicologist Vera Brodsky Lawrence, and a two-volume edition of his music published the following year. With Joplin\u2019s rags featured in the 1973 film The Sting<\/em>, his popularity was secured and Treemonisha<\/em> finally given a full professional staging by Houston Grand Opera in 1975.<\/p>\n We named Joplin one of\u00a0 the best black composers ever<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Recommended recording: Something non-mainstream: \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Charles Ives (1874-1954)<\/strong><\/p>\n Born in the same year as Arnold Schoenberg, Charles Ives<\/a><\/strong> in his way was just as much a pioneering modernist. Raised in the small New England town of Danbury, Ives received an unconventional musical education from his father, the local bandmaster. George Ives encouraged his son to \u2018use your ears like a man!\u2019 He relished accidental musical effects: for instance, the effect of two bands at an outdoor event playing different pieces \u2013 all the better if they were in different keys! By the time Charles came to Yale University to study composition, he was well advanced in his experiments in writing bi-tonal and polytonal music (in which musicians play music written in contrasting keys simultaneously). Taking composition lessons from Horatio Parker, Ives composed his First Symphony while still a student.<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> After graduating, Ives moved to New York where he worked in insurance, eventually setting up his own successful business. He composed his increasingly experimental music in his spare time, including his remarkable, eerily timeless piece The Unanswered Question <\/em>of 1906. He also wrote several songs, two piano sonatas (No. 2 being the notoriously difficult \u2018Concord\u2019), and three further symphonies, of which No. 3, \u2018The Camp Meeting\u2019, with its fond mix of old hymn tunes, barn dances and civil war songs, is the most approachable. Though completed in 1910, it was not performed until 1946, conducted by Lou Harrison (more on him anon): as a result, Ives was awarded the 1947 Pulitzer Prize, which he scorned \u2013 \u2018prizes are for boys, and I\u2019m all grown up!\u2019 \u2013 and gave all the prize money away, half of it to Harrison.<\/p>\n Recommended recording: \u00a0<\/p>\n Something non-mainstream: Florence Beatrice Smith Price<\/a><\/strong> is the first Afro-American woman composer of national importance, noted particularly for her symphonic works. Having studied composition at the New England Conservatory in Boston, followed by private lessons with George Chadwick, she taught in various colleges in the South, eventually becoming head of the music department of Clark College, Atlanta until 1912, when she married. In 1927, she and her husband moved to Chicago \u2013 presumably to escape the increasing racial oppression of the South. Price played a major role in Chicago\u2019s musical life as a concert pianist, organist and composer.<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> In 1932, she won first prize in the Wanamaker competition for her Symphony in E minor: with its premiere in 1933 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Frederick Stock, she became the first Afro-American woman to have a work performed by a major American orchestra. Her music was taken up by other orchestras, and her fame was secured by Marian Anderson\u2019s performance of her Songs to the Dark Virgin<\/em>, a setting of words a poem by Langston Hughes, a noted leader of the Harlem Renaissance, which was hailed by the Chicago Daily News <\/em>as \u2018one of the greatest immediate successes ever won by an American song\u2019.<\/p>\n We named Price one of the greatest female composers ever<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Recommended recording: Born into a musical family, Grof\u00e9 was one of the first Americans to successfully bridge popular and classical music; he is perhaps most famous for making the orchestral arrangement of Gershwin\u2019s Rhapsody in Blue<\/em><\/a><\/strong> that made that work so famous. In the 1910s, he played viola in the Los Angeles Symphony, while also performing in theatre pit bands and with his own dance band. After making some band arrangements for drummer Art Hickman, Grof\u00e9\u2019s abilities were recognised by bandleader and conductor Paul Whiteman, who commissioned him to make several big band arrangements for his band in the 1920s \u2013 including orchestrating the original two-piano version of Gershwin\u2019s Rhapsody in Blue<\/em> for its 1924 premiere. Grof\u00e9 established the big band convention of having intricately composed sections interleaved with episodes of improvisation. As a composer, he is mostly remembers for his five movement Grand Canyon Suite<\/em>\u00a0(1931), an extravagant technicolor orchestral evocation comparable to similarly grandiose canvases by Respighi.<\/p>\n Recommended recording: \u00a0<\/p>\n Of Swedish ancestry, in 1921 Howard Hanson became the first American to be awarded the Prix de Rome, spending three years at the American Academy in Rome where he composed his Symphony No. 1, \u2018Nordic\u2019. His more famous \u2018Romantic\u2019 Symphony No. 2 followed in 1930: originally composed to celebrate the Boston Symphony Orchestra\u2019s 50th anniversary (as was Stravinsky\u2019<\/a><\/strong>s Symphony of Psalms<\/em> and Prokofiev<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s Fourth Symphony), Hanson\u2019s \u2018Romantic\u2019 is now the work he is perhaps best known for since Ridley Scott used the end of its first movement with its soothing strains as balm for the end of his nerve-jangling film Alien<\/em>\u00a0(1979). Hanson was a powerful figure in American music, founding the annual American Music Festival, and being director of the Eastman School of Music for forty years from its foundation in 1924 until his own retirement in 1964, which under his leadership became one of America\u2019s most prestigious conservatories.<\/p>\n Recommended recording: \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n He was one of the earliest of the great pioneers of American classical music, inventing what is now called \u2018extended techniques\u2019 for piano playing. He not only introduced tone clusters, created by playing the keyboard with forearm or the flat of the hand, but also altered the sound of the piano by muting its strings with pieces of cardboard or metal \u2013 a technique usually associated with much later composers such as John Cage<\/a><\/strong> (a pupil of Cowell\u2019s) and George Crumb. He made several tours of Europe between 1923 and 1933, making friends with Bart\u00f3k and Berg and taking lessons from Schoenberg. In the 1930s he started using elements of indeterminacy in his music, suggesting that parts of his score could be performed in any order determined by the players, and leaving some bars open for improvisation. He wrote no less than 21 symphonies.<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> Recommended recording: \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Gershwin<\/a><\/strong> began his career as one of the most successful song writers in New York\u2019s Tin Pan Alley, and ended arguably the first American to write an operatic masterpiece with Porgy and Bess.<\/em> His first great hit was the song \u2018Swanee\u2019 (1919), and number of successful Broadway musicals starting with Piccadilly to Broadway<\/em> followed.<\/p>\n Talented and highly ambitious, the sensation caused by Gershwin\u2019s Rhapsody in Blue<\/em> (as orchestrated by Grof\u00e9) spurred him to aspire to be a great classical composer. He famously approached at least three leading European composers asking for composition lessons \u2013 Ravel<\/a><\/strong>, Stravinsky<\/a><\/strong> and Schoenberg<\/a><\/strong> \u2013 who all told him in effect that he was already pursuing his own valid and successful path. Nonetheless, he finally secured lessons with Joseph Schillinger in the 1930s: Schillinger\u2019s influence on Gershwin has been much disputed, particularly by his lyricist brother Ira, and certainly Gershwin\u2019s highly characteristic orchestral style is to heard particularly in his Piano Concerto (1925) and An American in Paris <\/em>(1928), both written before his lessons with Schillinger. Yet there are hints of greater harmonic adventurousness in his post-Schillinger Variations on \u2018I got rhythm\u2019<\/em> for piano and orchestra (1934), and a consummate range of musical expression in his opera.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Recommended recording: <\/p><\/div> <\/section> Possibly because he started life as a farmer in Nebraska, and only pursued music after World War I<\/a><\/strong>, Roy Harris may have been recognised but too often with a degree of condescension: Wilfred Mellers in his mighty tome\u00a0Music in a New Found Land<\/em>\u00a0judged hm as \u2018essentially a primitive and na\u00eff\u2019. Such an assessment seems meaningless in the face of the mastery presented by the thrilling musical journey that is Harris\u2019s Symphony No. 3 (1937-38, revised 1939), which \u2013 rather like a work by Sibelius<\/a><\/strong> \u2013 morphs as you listen from a deceptively folksy beginning to a wonderfully orchestrated tidal flow. Perhaps, the essence of Harris\u2019s music is that he was never ashamed of his background, which he never forsook even after training under the formidable Nadia Boulanger, but rather embraced and integrated the folkish music he knew so well from childhood (in that sense, closer to the folk style of his country than even Vaughan Williams<\/a><\/strong> was to his). A great deal of his music, such as the relatively early but characteristic Piano Trio of 1934, is still to be recorded: but his Third Symphony, the dreamy modality of his Violin Concerto (composed in 1949, but not performed until 1984), and the Symphony for Voices, his striking and effective setting Walt Whitman, are well worth discovering.<\/p>\n Recommended recording: Something non-mainstream: \u00a0<\/p>\n The \u2018Duke\u2019, in total contrast to poor Harris, quickly earned the respect of the classical world: he was hailed by Constant Lambert in his influential book Music Ho!<\/em>\u00a0(published 1934) as \u2018a real composer, the first jazz composer of distinction, and [erroneously] the first negro composer of distinction\u2019, and a whole 14-page chapter was devoted to his career and work in Mellers\u2019 landmark tome (published 1964).<\/p>\n Born in Washington, DC, Edward Kennedy Ellington, unlike other celebrated black musicians such as Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith, was from a well-to-do family. He moved to New York, the city of his idol the pianist-composer James P Johnson (1894-1955), pioneer of \u2018stride\u2019 piano and a key figure in the evolution of ragtime into jazz<\/a><\/strong>. There, Ellington established his band at the Cotton Club. The band\u2019s first hit, East St Louis Toodle-oo <\/em>(1926), was essentially an Ellington composition based on a tune created by his first trumpeter, Bubber Miley: as Mellers points out, its \u2018shuffling ostinato<\/a><\/strong>\u2019 represents \u2018an old man shuffling monotonously down a dusty road\u2019, the ostinato suggesting \u2018man\u2019s everyday destiny, from which the improvised solos speak yearningly\u2019. Ellington\u2019s music continued to speak potently to generations of listeners, as he composed an estimated 3 thousand works, distinctive in sound and haunting in their melodiousness.<\/p>\n We named Duke Ellington one of the greatest jazz pianists ever<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Recommended recording:Best American composers ever<\/h2>\n
John Philip Sousa (1854-1932)<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Amy Beach (1867-1944)<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Scott Joplin (?1868-1917)<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Florence Price (1887-1953)<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Ferde Grof<\/strong>\u00e9 (1892-1972)<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Howard Hanson (1896-1981)<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Henry Cowell (1897-1965)<\/strong><\/h3>\n
George Gershwin (1898-1937)<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Roy Harris (1898-1979)<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Duke Ellington (1899-1974)<\/strong><\/h3>\n