10 favourite American composers

[Ghost of Baron Scarpia]

What has the US contributed to the history of music that is uniquely American and of lasting quality?

Jazz
Blues
Gospel
Musical Theater
Vernacular musics Folk, Bluegrass, and related styles

The "classical" music that is written by Americans that does not draw inspiration from these styles, imo, is not uniquely American.  Specifically, the composers whose careers have primarily been in academe I place no importance on, vis a vis, their importance as American Composers.

I don't think American classical music has draw from Jazz, Blues, Musical Theatre, etc, to be "uniquely American." And I don't see why anyone associated with an institution of learning is automatically to be discounted.

[San Antone]

What is "uniquely American"?

I think I've explained that in my posts.

Why do you discount composers who work in universities to pay their bills?

I don't discount them.  I just think they do not exhibit specifically American qualities in their music.  I mentioned an "international style" in an earlier post.  Nothing wrong with that; but there is also not much uniquely American about their music other than their place of birth.

How long exactly must a thing last to be of "lasting quality"? (It's always struck me as odd that recent music gets slammed for not having lasted a long time. That makes about as much sense as slamming Mendelssohn for not writing electroacoustic music.

And, after all, we only have so much time. I'm not waiting around for another century or two to see if I can enjoy Jon Nelson or Maryanne Amacher or Alice Shields. I can enjoy them right now. You know, while I'm alive.)

This thread is not about enjoying the music from any composer; of course we all enjoy composers for a variety of reasons.  The thread is about American composers.  In my post I described what were the attributes that influenced my choices.  My reasons are not yours, or anyone else's.  But I wished to add them to the discussion. 

What in the music makes it uniquely American?  I tried to answer that question.

Thanks for your comments, a conversation was what I was hoping for.

[San Antone]

I don't think American classical music has draw from Jazz, Blues, Musical Theatre, etc, to be "uniquely American." And I don't see why anyone associated with an institution of learning is automatically to be discounted.

I, obviously, disagree with you.  See my response to some guy for more clarification.

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

I don't think American classical music has draw from Jazz, Blues, Musical Theatre, etc, to be "uniquely American."

I think there's a sort of "broad open spaces" orchestral style that sounds very American (e.g. the 3rd syms of Copland and Harris). A couple of times when I've heard such pieces on the radio, I've thought "hey, that sounds like mid-century American music" and I turned out to be right.

Another thing that I think of as typically American is eccentricity or a certain kind of orneriness in the music (e.g. Nancarrow, Ives, Ruggles, Partch), which may or may not be connected to the genres listed above.

[San Antone]

I think there's a sort of "broad open spaces" orchestral style that sounds very American (e.g. the 3rd syms of Copland and Harris). A couple of times when I've heard such pieces on the radio, I've thought "hey, that sounds like mid-century American music" and I turned out to be right.

Another thing that I think of as typically American is eccentricity or a certain kind of orneriness in the music (e.g. Nancarrow, Ives, Ruggles, Partch), which may or may not be connected to the genres listed above.

I agree on both points.  Copland, Ives, Gershwin, Bernstein were my top four choices and all drew inspiration from the genre's I mentioned.  But, John Cage was certainly American in his eccentricity and pioneering spirit. 

The prairie landscape I would assume is the inspiration behind the wide-open orchestral sound you spoke of - and it has become somewhat of a cliche in film music.   As have obvious jazz quotations.  It is tricky and my own opinion is the music that will best exemplify America is not "classical" but the pure forms of the genres I listed.

[André]

If I counted Bloch as an American he would be part of the list, certinly in the top 5.

Among those born in the USA:

Adams
Cage
Carter
Danielpour
Diamond
Harris
Herrmann
Hovhaness
Piston
Schuman

[amw]

What has the US contributed to the history of music that is uniquely American and of lasting quality?

Jazz
Blues
Gospel
Musical Theater
Vernacular musics Folk, Bluegrass, and related styles

I generally agree with you, but would suggest that none of these are contributions by "the US"—they are specifically contributions by the Black population the US imported as a slave labour force, or in the case of bluegrass/country & western/etc, a creative synthesis of Black music with the music of the Scotch-Irish population the British settlers imported as an indentured servant labour force. All of these genres of music originated at the margins of "American" society among groups despised & exploited by the white settler majority, and the music itself was despised and considered uncultured garbage by the majority until eventually winning them over in conjunction with ongoing civil rights struggles for broader acceptance and equality. As such it's somewhat problematic to let "America" take credit for these things.

It's also technically inaccurate since several of these Afro-diasporic genres also developed simultaneously in other former slave states (incl the Caribbean and Latin America) although they evolved differently over time.

[San Antone]

I generally agree with you, but would suggest that none of these are contributions by "the US"—they are specifically contributions by the Black population the US imported as a slave labour force, or in the case of bluegrass/country & western/etc, a creative synthesis of Black music with the music of the Scotch-Irish population the British settlers imported as an indentured servant labour force. All of these genres of music originated at the margins of "American" society among groups despised & exploited by the white settler majority, and the music itself was despised and considered uncultured garbage by the majority until eventually winning them over in conjunction with ongoing civil rights struggles for broader acceptance and equality. As such it's somewhat problematic to let "America" take credit for these things.

It's also technically inaccurate since several of these Afro-diasporic genres also developed simultaneously in other former slave states (incl the Caribbean and Latin America) although they evolved differently over time.

Agree with your larger point, i.e. African Americans created Jazz and Blues (Gospel and Vernacular musics such as Bluegrass and others were significantly created by both African Americans and in some cases primarily by whites), but do not agree with your statement that the music is not American.  Duke Ellington defined Jazz as African music developed in an American environment. 

The fact remains that these musics are the product of American culture, which spouted from American soil. 

[SymphonicAddict]

Seeing other lists, mine looks very conservative 

Adams, John Coolidge
Barber
Copland
Diamond
Flagello
Hanson
Harris
Hovhaness
Rosner
Rouse

I don't know many works of the highlighted composers, but from what I've heard I think I could consider them favorites.

[JBS]

In no real order
Gottschalk
Gerswhin
Ives
Copland
Corigliano
Barber
Carter
Sousa
Herbert
John Adams

[Mirror Image]

Let's see...

(In no particular order)

Barber
Copland
Ives
Schuman
Diamond
Harrison
Hovhaness
Piston
Ellington
Monk

Let's see Hovhaness has got to go, so add in a two-way tie between Crawford Seeger and Ruggles. Cheating I know, but who really cares? These lists can't be taken but with a grain of salt anyway.

[Ken B]

Virgil Thomson, who I think easily passes San Antone's test of being distinctly American, had a different view. He was asked what a composer must do to write American music. "1. Be American. 2. Write music." I think he had a point. At least in the 20th century, polyglot cosmopolitanism *was* distinctly American. So American music had many possible roots. I count Kurt Weill as distinctly American. He certainly insisted on the American bit, even changing the way he pronounced his name.
What say, San Antone, about Curt While?

[San Antone]

Virgil Thomson, who I think easily passes San Antone's test of being distinctly American, had a different view. He was asked what a composer must do to write American music. "1. Be American. 2. Write music." I think he had a point. At least in the 20th century, polyglot cosmopolitanism *was* distinctly American. So American music had many possible roots. I count Kurt Weill as distinctly American. He certainly insisted on the American bit, even changing the way he pronounced his name.
What say, San Antone, about Curt While?

Kurt Weill's primary contribution was in Musical Theater, so yes, he would get a passing grade (if he had not been foreign born).     Many of his songs have entered the Great American Songbook, e.g. Mack the Knife, September Song and others. 

Regarding Virgil Thompson's definition, I think it is reductive.  Authors have spoken for generations of writing the Great American Novel.  I think what they mean is capturing life as it is experienced in the USA during a specific period, Fitzgerald's Jazz Age, e.g. an "American" novel as distinct from any other national expression.  Composers, imo, become uniquely American when they attempt the same kind of thing with extended works.

[amw]

Agree with your larger point, i.e. African Americans created Jazz and Blues (Gospel and Vernacular musics such as Bluegrass and others were significantly created by both African Americans and in some cases primarily by whites), but do not agree with your statement that the music is not American.  Duke Ellington defined Jazz as African music developed in an American environment. 

The fact remains that these musics are the product of American culture, which spouted from American soil. 

I think a materialist view of history can lead to three possible interpretations of "American culture":

1) that "American culture" is that of the settlers that created and still rule over "America", not their slaves, or the aboriginal peoples they exterminated, or the immigrants they brought in as a labour source. As such there are no unique "American" cultural features except for those that celebrate dominance, because everything else either emerged from cultures that were considered alien and non-American at the time of their emergence, or was brought by settlers as an attempt to impose their own indigenous culture. (Benjamin Franklin wrote string quartets, etc.) So in that sense there's been very little "American culture" apart from like, Birth of a Nation and The Turner Diaries.

2) that "American culture" is that of the aboriginal American peoples and those who became indigenised through dispossession—i.e. that the settlers are still fundamentally Europeans and "belong" in Europe, but that enslaved people, cut off from their roots, gained a connection to the land shared with native peoples, leading to the wide variety of Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean art forms that have emerged & could only have emerged in the New World. Whereas anyone writing symphonies & piano sonatas is still essentially living in a European tradition and could be deported to Germany with no major disruption to anyone's life. Although I wouldn't take you for a materialist this is what your view seems to come closest to. Dvořák also agreed.

3) that "American culture" is a product of both the violence of enslavement & genocide, and the Black & indigenous resilience within it; i.e. that it encompasses both the work of settlers seeking to colonise and destroy, and the work of people seeking to resist. This political struggle forms a cultural milieu and everything created within that culture is "American"—but not neutral with regard to that political struggle. For example, spirituals and gospel emerged because slaveowners banned their slaves from drumming or playing musical instruments. Copland's music conveying "wide open spaces" is artistic colonisation of spaces that only became "wide open" due to the wars against, and eventual ethnic cleansing of, the Plains Indians in the mid-to-late 19th century. The same can be true of other conservatory trained composers such as Elliott Carter and his 1st string quartet recolonising the "Arizona desert" (i.e. Tohono O'odham territory) with his own European-style music. Whereas the music of e.g. Mingus cannot be properly understood outside a context of Black resistance and nationalism.

I go back and forth on these but at the moment I'm most sympathetic to 3. Obviously those who don't take a materialist view can disregard this and use American as a simple marker of citizenship or atomised individual identity.

[San Antone]

I think a materialist view of history can lead to three possible interpretations of "American culture":

1) that "American culture" is that of the settlers that created and still rule over "America", not their slaves, or the aboriginal peoples they exterminated, or the immigrants they brought in as a labour source. As such there are no unique "American" cultural features except for those that celebrate dominance, because everything else either emerged from cultures that were considered alien and non-American at the time of their emergence, or was brought by settlers as an attempt to impose their own indigenous culture. (Benjamin Franklin wrote string quartets, etc.) So in that sense there's been very little "American culture" apart from like, Birth of a Nation and The Turner Diaries.

2) that "American culture" is that of the aboriginal American peoples and those who became indigenised through dispossession—i.e. that the settlers are still fundamentally Europeans and "belong" in Europe, but that enslaved people, cut off from their roots, gained a connection to the land shared with native peoples, leading to the wide variety of Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean art forms that have emerged & could only have emerged in the New World. Whereas anyone writing symphonies & piano sonatas is still essentially living in a European tradition and could be deported to Germany with no major disruption to anyone's life. Although I wouldn't take you for a materialist this is what your view seems to come closest to. Dvořák also agreed.

3) that "American culture" is a product of both the violence of enslavement & genocide, and the Black & indigenous resilience within it; i.e. that it encompasses both the work of settlers seeking to colonise and destroy, and the work of people seeking to resist. This political struggle forms a cultural milieu and everything created within that culture is "American"—but not neutral with regard to that political struggle. For example, spirituals and gospel emerged because slaveowners banned their slaves from drumming or playing musical instruments. Copland's music conveying "wide open spaces" is artistic colonisation of spaces that only became "wide open" due to the wars against, and eventual ethnic cleansing of, the Plains Indians in the mid-to-late 19th century. The same can be true of other conservatory trained composers such as Elliott Carter and his 1st string quartet recolonising the "Arizona desert" (i.e. Tohono O'odham territory) with his own European-style music. Whereas the music of e.g. Mingus cannot be properly understood outside a context of Black resistance and nationalism.

I go back and forth on these but at the moment I'm most sympathetic to 3. Obviously those who don't take a materialist view can disregard this and use American as a simple marker of citizenship or atomised individual identity.

I think your analysis is simplistic.  Take for example Louis Armstrong and the history of New Orleans music.  New Orleans had a free born Black community, including but not limited to Creole Blacks.  These people were never slaves, and were trained musicians in the Eurocentric tradition.  Louis Armstrong's people were descendants of slaves from the surrounding areas of Louisiana and Mississippi who came to New Orleans during the post-Civil War period.  It was the interaction of these two Black communities that produced early Jazz, and which was transported to Chicago in the 1910s and '20s. 

The picture is complicated further with the taking up of this music by Whites such as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, who were the first to record the music and even claimed to have invented it.  Louis Armstrong was lionized in the '20s and incredibly influential with white trumpeters learning his solos note for note.  This cultural process is what produced later styles of jazz such as Swing, Bebop and Cool Jazz all of which brought in even more of Eurocentric stylistic features, while retaining in varying degrees the original Blues basis and which eventually produced Hard Bop, the last truly Jazz stylstic advancement.  (Free Jazz of the 60s and 70s I think went too far into a Eurocentric direction (while ironically incorporating a Black Nationalism/Liberation political aspect) and is closer to 20th century European experimental music than Jazz.)

Louis Armstrong is the most important New Orleans Jazz musician, but whose later career was more American pop.  That process of stylistic change began in the 1930s, after his greatest jazz recordings had been made (Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings) and he started his big band (the Decca years).  He patterned his band on one of his favorite bands, Guy Lombardo's, a Canadian whose brand of music was called "sweet jazz".  Later in the '50s and '60s during the Dixieland revival did he go back to a small band (the All Stars) and replicating his earlier New Orleans music, although now peppered with pop tunes like Hello Dolly.

It was the cross breeding of Eurocentric music with Blues that basically produced jazz.  Much like the Scots-Irish who settled Appalachia and brought with them British folk ballads which were transformed into Bluegrass and Country music after decades of separation and independent development.

American culture is the product of the cultural mixing that occurred when the generation after the colonial period began to create their own music and culture in America but which was naturally a product of the culture that was carried over from other continents.

I can tell you from personal experience that African American Jazz musicians think of themselves as Americans and Jazz as an American music, while at the same time and in varying degrees being bitter about the social injustices and exploitation they have experienced due to racism.

To the extent a composer's music is primarily Eurocentric (university) or native American (Jazz, Blues, Bluegrass) is what makes them an uniquely American composer.  Wynton Marsalis has written large form works which are a good examples of how this blending can produce something other than strictly Eurocentric classical music or a style of Jazz.

[vandermolen]

My new list, which is probably the same as my old list. But I like lists. 

Aaron Copland
Roy Harris
David Diamond
Leonard Bernstein
Samuel Barber
Kevin Puts
Alan Hovhaness
William Schuman
Howard Hanson
Robert Kurka

If the list was 'greatest' I'd include Charles Ives.
Feel bad about leaving out Piston and Gershwin, not to mention Herrmann.

[arpeggio]

I went to me CD library and these are the top ten with the number of recordings:

Samuel Barber 115
Elliot Carter 112
Aaron Copland 95
Alan Hovhaness 88
Morton Gould 86
William Schuman 78
Vincent Persichetti 78
Charles Ives 77
John Corigliano 65
Leonard Bernstein 61 

All of them are among my favorites

[SurprisedByBeauty]

I went to me CD library and these are the top ten with the number of recordings:

Samuel Barber 115
Elliot Carter 112
Aaron Copland 95
Alan Hovhaness 88
Morton Gould 86
William Schuman 78
Vincent Persichetti 78
Charles Ives 77
John Corigliano 65
Leonard Bernstein 61 

All of them are among my favorites

There are 78 recordings of William Schuman out there? My goodness, how tiny must my collection be if this is indicative of the rest of yours. 

[Crudblud]

In no particular order:

Frank Zappa
Charles Ives
Robert Ashley
Elliott Carter
Kate Soper
George Crumb
Conlon Nancarrow
Ruth Crawford Seeger
John Cage
Milton Babbitt

[arpeggio]

There are 78 recordings of William Schuman out there? My goodness, how tiny must my collection be if this is indicative of the rest of yours. 

There are many duplications.  Since I am a band junkie I have five recordings of George Washington Bridge.  Attached is a list of recordings in my library.