With any list of the best American composers, you're likely to find some deliciously eclectic soundworlds.
That's because, 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, jazz and bluegrass have all added flavour to a recognisable if well-varied style.
Another crucial element is America’s internationally renowned film industry, which has nurtured not only specialist composers such as Bernard Herrmann and John Williams (both of whom have also attempted to make inroads in the concert hall), but also such leading concert hall composers as Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein (who was so much more as well), and John Corigliano.
A truly international musical landscape
A significant number of Hollywood composers – such as Korngold, Steiner, and Waxman – 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.
Some refugees only temporarily settled in America, but nonetheless did their part while in that country to train a talented generation. These composers included Darius Milhaud, from whom the likes of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Dave Brubeck, Philip Glass, Burt Bacharach, and Iannis Xenakis learned their craft. Other significant émigrés who helped educate a generation of American composers include Bohusłav Martinů (who also taught Bacharach, as well as Alan Hovhaness) and Arnold Schoenberg (Dave Brubeck again, plus John Cage, Lou Harrison and others).
Nadia Boulanger and the Paris scene
Another ‘foreign’ teacher we should mention is Nadia Boulanger. A legend among American composers (and composers of other nations), Boulanger 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). Her pupils included Roy Harris, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Elliott Carter and many others.
So here is a representative selection of composers who have significantly contributed to all that is characteristic and best in ‘classical’ American music. We suggest at least one recommended recording for each composer – in some cases, as a bonus, we suggest a second ‘Something non-mainstream’ which either offers a lesser-known gem by that composer or a different aspect of their style.
Best American composers: late 19th and early 20th centuries
John Philip Sousa (1854-1932)
Today most widely remembered for his marches, this composer and bandmaster created around a hundred, including Liberty Bell (1893) and The Stars and Stripes Forever (1896). Just a year before writing Liberty Bell, 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 – a type of bass tuba designed to circle the player’s body, so making it more convenient for marching bands – was invented. Sadly, his band became victim of the Depression in 1931, just a year before its founder’s death. However, Sousa gained further posthumous fame when in the late 1960s the BBC comedy show Monty Python’s Flying Circus appropriated Liberty Bell as its signature tune.
John Philip Sousa recommended recording
A Sousa Celebration
Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Kristjan Järvi Chandos CHSA5182
Amy Beach (1867-1944)
Almost by any measure – let alone the fact she was a woman making her career against considerable odds – 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.
She also effectively taught herself orchestration (working with Berlioz’s treatise) and fugue. She made several successful appearances performing with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, though when she married Dr HHA Beach, in deference to her husband’s wishes, she ceased performing. Instead, she devoted herself to composition: in her married years she wrote such major works as the ‘Gaelic’ Symphony, with its striking wind-swept opening, and her Piano Concerto.
- We named Amy Beach one of the best female composers of all time
'Bold and adventurous'
After her husband’s 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 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 – in all she created more than 300 works in various genres.
Amy Beach recommended recording
Gaelic Symphony; Piano Concerto
Alan Feinberg (piano); Nashville Symphony Orchestra/Kenneth Schermerhorn Naxos 8.559139
Scott Joplin (?1868-1917)
One of the first Afro-American composers to now be widely celebrated, Scott Joplin started as a pianist in brothels in St Louis and Chicago, where he created the ragtime style – exemplified by his popular Maple Leaf Rag. 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 Honor, 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, 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. Heartbroken, 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’s rags featured in the 1973 film The Sting, his popularity was secured and Treemonisha finally given a full professional staging by Houston Grand Opera in 1975.
- We named Scott Joplin one of the best black composers ever
Scott Joplin recommended recording
The Entertainer: The Very Best of Scott Joplin
Joshua Rifkin (piano) Nonesuch 7559794492
Off the beaten track
Treemonisha Paragon Ragtime Singers & Orchestra/Rick Benjamin New World NW 80720
Best American composers: between the wars
Charles Ives (1874-1954)
Born in the same year as Arnold Schoenberg, Charles Ives 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 ‘use your ears like a man!’ He relished accidental musical effects: for instance, the effect of two bands at an outdoor event playing different pieces – all the better if they were in different keys! By the time Charles came to Yale University to study composition, he had made major advances 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.
An early piece - but an eerily timeless one
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 of 1906. He also wrote several songs, and two piano sonatas (the better known being No. 2, ‘Concord’, a portrait of some of the illustrious inhabitants of that Massachusetts town including the writer Louisa May Alcott).
There were also three further symphonies, of which No. 3 ‘The Camp Meeting’, with its fond mix of old hymn tunes, barn dances and Civil War songs, is the most approachable. Copland completed 'The Camp Meeting' in 1910. It did not, however, see its first performance until 1946, when a certain Lou Harrison (more on him anon) conducted. As a result, Ives earned the 1947 Pulitzer Prize, which he scorned – ‘prizes are for boys, and I’m all grown up!’ – and gave all the prize money away, half of it to Harrison.
We named Charles Ives one of the best composers of all time
Charles Ives recommended recording
Michael Tilson Thomas conducts Ives Sony 19439788332
Off the beaten track:
Romanzo di Central Park and other songs
Gerald Finley (baritone), Magnus Johnston (violin), Julius Drake (piano) Hyperion CDA 67644
Florence Price (1887-1953)
Florence Beatrice Smith Price 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 – presumably to escape the increasing racial oppression of the South. Price played a major role in Chicago’s musical life as a concert pianist, organist and composer.
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’s performance of her Songs to the Dark Virgin, a setting of words a poem by Langston Hughes, a noted leader of the Harlem Renaissance, which was hailed by the Chicago Daily News as ‘one of the greatest immediate successes ever won by an American song’.
We named Price one of the greatest female composers ever
Florence Price recommended recording
Symphonies 1 & 3
Philadelphia Orchestra/Yannick Nézet-Séguin Deutsche Grammophon 486 2029
Ferde Grofé (1892-1972)
Born into a musical family, Grofé 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’s Rhapsody in Blue that made that work so famous.
In the 1910s, the young Grofé 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, Grofé’s abilities won recognition from bandleader and conductor Paul Whiteman, who commissioned him to make several big band arrangements for his band in the 1920s – including orchestrating the original two-piano version of Rhapsody in Blue for its 1924 premiere.
Grofé established the big band convention of having intricately composed sections interleaved with episodes of improvisation. As a composer, he is mostly remembered for his five movement Grand Canyon Suite (1931), an extravagant technicolor orchestral evocation comparable to similarly grandiose canvases by Respighi.
Grand Canyon Suite best recording
Grand Canyon Suite; Mississippi, etc
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/William Stromberg Naxos 8.559007
Howard Hanson (1896-1981)
Of Swedish ancestry, in 1921 Howard Hanson became the first American to win the Prix de Rome. This resulted in three years at the American Academy in Rome where he composed his Symphony No. 1, ‘Nordic’. His more famous ‘Romantic’ Symphony No. 2 followed in 1930. Originally composed to celebrate the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 50th anniversary (as was Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms and Prokofiev’s Fourth Symphony), Hanson’s ‘Romantic’ is now the work he is perhaps best known for. That's largely 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 (1979).
Hanson was a powerful figure in American music. He founded the annual American Music Festival, and served as director of the Eastman School of Music for 40 years from its foundation in 1924 until his own retirement in 1964. Under his leadership, the Eastman became one of America’s most prestigious conservatories.
Howard Hanson recommended recording
Symphony No. 2 ‘Romantic’
Seattle Symphony/Gerard Schwarz Naxos 8.559701
Henry Cowell (1897-1965)
Henry Cowell was one of the earliest of the great pioneers of American classical music, inventing what is now called ‘extended techniques’ 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 – a technique usually associated with much later composers such as John Cage (a pupil of Cowell’s) and George Crumb.
He made several tours of Europe between 1923 and 1933, making friends with Bartók 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.
Henry Cowell recommended recording
Quartet for flute, oboe, cello and harpsichord, etc
Continuum Naxos 8.559192
George Gershwin (1898-1937)
Any discussion of the best American composers must include the legendary George Gershwin. This prodigiously gifted composer and songwriter began his career as one of the most successful writers in New York’s Tin Pan Alley, and ended arguably the first American to write an operatic masterpiece with Porgy and Bess. His first great hit was the song ‘Swanee’ (1919), and a number of successful Broadway musicals starting with Piccadilly to Broadway followed.
Talented and highly ambitious, the sensation caused by Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (as orchestrated by Grofé) spurred him to aspire to be a great classical composer. He famously approached at least three leading European composers asking for composition lessons. These were Ravel, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, who all told him in effect that he was already pursuing his own valid and successful path.
Nonetheless, Gershwin finally secured lessons with Joseph Schillinger in the 1930s. Schillinger’s influence on Gershwin has been much disputed, particularly by his lyricist brother Ira, and certainly Gershwin’s highly characteristic orchestral style is to heard particularly in his Piano Concerto (1925) and An American in Paris (1928), both written before his lessons with Schillinger. Yet there are hints of greater harmonic adventurousness in his post-Schillinger Variations on ‘I got rhythm’ for piano and orchestra (1934), and a consummate range of musical expression in his opera.
Rhapsody in Blue best recording
Rhapsody in Blue; An American in Paris; Piano Concerto in F
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra/André Previn (piano) Decca
- Six of the best works by George Gershwin
- The best recordings of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue
- Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue…What to listen to next
Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-53)
Trained as a pianist at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago, Ruth Crawford in the 1920s met Henry Cowell through one of her piano teachers, Djane Lavoie Herz (herself a disciple of Scriabin). Cowell put Crawford on the board of his New Music Society, and published several of her works.
Crawford wrote about two-thirds of her compositions between 1924 and 1929, in that time also becoming a founder member of the Chicago chapter of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). Her works from that period show her already developed taste for dissonance and post-tonal harmonies inspired by Scriabin’s music.
However, her stature as an American modernist rests more on the works she created in New York from 1931. These followed her year abroad, on a Guggenheim Fellowship awarded for her compositions (the first woman to be so honoured), spending her time in Berlin and Paris where she particularly valued her encounters with Berg and Bartók.
Crawford returned to New York in November 1931, and married the American folklorist and musicologist Charles Seeger the following year (their children include the folk singers Mike and Peggy Seeger). In 1936, the Seegers moved to Washington, where Ruth’s interest shifted from composition to the preservation and promotion of American folk music. Her one original composition of that time, Rissolty Rossolty, is a wonderfully playful and accessible ‘American Fantasia for Orchestra’ based on folk tunes.
Ruth Crawford Seeger recommended recording
Ruth Crawford Seeger: Portrait
Schönberg Ensemble/Oliver Knussen Deutsche Grammophon 449 9252
Best American composers: World War II and after
Roy Harris (1898-1979)
Possibly because he started life as a farmer in Nebraska, and only pursued music after World War I, Roy Harris may have been recognised but too often with a degree of condescension. For example, Wilfred Mellers in his mighty tome Music in a New Found Land judged hm as ‘essentially a primitive and naïf’. Such an assessment seems meaningless in the face of the mastery presented by the thrilling musical journey that is Harris’s Symphony No. 3 (1937-38, revised 1939), which – rather like a work by Sibelius – morphs as you listen from a deceptively folksy beginning to a wonderfully orchestrated tidal flow.
Perhaps the essence of Harris’s music is that he was never ashamed of his background, which he never forsook even after training under the formidable Nadia Boulanger. Rather, he embraced and integrated the folkish music he knew so well from childhood (in that sense, Harris was closer to the folk style of his country than even Vaughan Williams 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. However, his rugged, widescreen 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.
Roy Harris recommended recording
Symphony No. 3
Colorado Symphony/Marin Alsop Naxos 8.559227
Off the beaten track:
Violin Concerto; Symphony No. 1* Gregory Fulkerson (violin); Louisville Orchestra/Lawrence Leighton Smith, *Jorge Mester First Edition LOU-786
Duke Ellington (1899-1974)
The ‘Duke’, 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! (published 1934) as ‘a real composer, the first jazz composer of distinction, and [erroneously] the first negro composer of distinction’. Similarly, a whole 14-page chapter was devoted to his career and work in Mellers’ landmark Music in a New Found Land (published 1964).
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). The pioneer of ‘stride’ piano, Johnson was a key figure in the evolution of ragtime into jazz. There, Ellington established his band at the Cotton Club.
The band’s first hit, East St Louis Toodle-oo (1926), was essentially an Ellington composition based on a tune created by his first trumpeter, Bubber Miley: as Mellers points out, its ‘shuffling ostinato’ represents ‘an old man shuffling monotonously down a dusty road’, the ostinato suggesting ‘man’s everyday destiny, from which the improvised solos speak yearningly’. Ellington’s music continued to speak potently to generations of listeners, as he composed an estimated 3,000 works, all distinctive in sound and haunting in their melodiousness.
We named Duke Ellington one of the greatest jazz pianists ever
Duke Ellington recommended recording
The Essential Duke Ellington (recordings 1927-60)
Columbia
Aaron Copland (1900-90)
Though based in New York, Aaron Copland effectively distilled the essence of rural America in his cowboy ballets. Two of these in particular, Billy the Kid and Rodeo with their robust orchestrations, lively rhythms and penny-plain harmonies, helped define the sound of Hollywood’s Wild West. Copland’s style was widely imitated in scores for films starring John Wayne and Gary Cooper.
His formula was to take a number of genuine folk and popular songs from that late-19th-century world, and set them in a clean-cut, muscular style derived from Stravinsky’s neo-classical works (a style very much promoted by his teacher, Nadia Boulanger).
'Copland effectively distilled the essence of rural America'
Copland refined this style for another evocation of historic Americana, Appalachian Spring, composed during the Second World War in 1944. As if in reaction to the fraught events taking place in Europe and around the Pacific, his new ballet mythologises America’s past. It evokes a lush green pastoral of rural Pennsylvania (notwithstanding the ballet’s evocative title, which it was given after it had been composed), in which a young couple plan to settle upon their marriage. The wartime spirit is more directly addressed in his defiant Symphony No. 3 – started during World War II but completed shortly after its end – from which ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’ is taken.
This is not quite the full measure of Copland, however. He started off as a bold modernist in the style of Bartók and Prokofiev, causing a sensation with his Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, written in 1924 for his former teacher Nadia Boulanger to make her American debut as organist. In the 1950s and ‘60s he incorporated serial techniques in Stravinsky’s manner into a number of his own works, including the orchestral works Connotations (1961) and Inscape (1967).
Aaron Copland recommended recording
A Copland Celebration
London Symphony Orchestra, New Philharmonia Orchestra, Columbia Chamber Ensemble, Columbia String Ensemble/Aaron Copland
Off the beaten track:
Music for the Theatre; Connotations; Inscape
New York Philharmonic/Leonard Bernstein Sony
Elliott Carter (1908-2012)
In his mind-bogglingly long life and career, Elliott Carter studied under Gustav Holst at Harvard during the composer’s lectureship there in 1932. He then managed to outlive almost an entire generation of post-World War II modernists including Stockhausen, Nono and Berio (Pierre Boulez being one notable exception). And he continued to compose years after his 100th birthday.
His music, likewise, seems set fair to outlive all of theirs, being admired and championed by such musicians and conductors as the Kronos Quartet, pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, and the conductors Daniel Barenboim and especially Oliver Knussen (who, alas, died far too young, only outliving Carter by about six years).
A good, approachable introduction is his Holiday Overture, written in his neo-classical style in 1944 to celebrate the liberation of Paris – breezy and typically American in its airy, brassy textures. Carter’s tougher modernist style followed in the 1950s, after he had edited Charles Ives’ music and started to explore the parameters of music. His Variations for Orchestra (1955) well illustrates his change of style.
Where to start with Elliott Carter
Symphony No. 1; Piano Concerto; Holiday Overture
Mark Wait (piano); Nashville Symphony Orchestra/Kenneth Schermerhorn Naxos 8.559151
Something a bit different:
Late works: Controversies and a Conversation, etc
BBC Symphony Orchestra/Oliver Knussen Ondine ODE 12962
Samuel Barber (1910-81)
Though remembered above all for his Adagio for Strings – a movement originally part of his String Quartet, Op. 11 (1935-36) – Samuel Barber was also one of America’s greatest writers for voice, composing many beautiful songs. His aunt, Louise Homer, regularly graced New York’s Metropolitan Opera with her fine contralto voice, and was married to the song composer Sydney Homer, who mentored his young nephew.
Barber entered the Curtis Institute aged 14, and while a student there became a lifelong friend and partner of fellow composer Gian Carlo Menotti. Barber himself developed a fine baritone voice, which to an extent explains the mastery of his setting of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach (1931) for baritone voice and strings, much admired by Vaughan Williams. He also wrote several fine songs for voice and piano, such as the cycle Hermit Songs of 1953. Then there were fine choral works, including the set of three titled Reincarnations (1939-40), and three operas including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Vanessa (1958).
What is Samuel Barber's masterpiece?
We haven’t even started talking about his orchestral music, including a beautiful Violin Concerto, and his instrumental works including his formidable Piano Sonata (1949). Perhaps his greatest masterpiece, though, is again written for voice, though with full orchestral accompaniment. Knoxville: Summer of 1915, composed in the spring of 1947, is Barber’s setting of a quintessential American scene.
It's a lazy summer’s evening in the riverside town in the Southern States as described by James Agee, who wrote it in 1938 in recollection of his own childhood in Knoxville. It captures the uncomplicated happiness of a child secure in the love of his parents – significant as Agee depicts the summer before the death of his father. Barber dedicated his setting to his own father, who he knew was terminally ill.
Samuel Barber recommended recording
Samuel Barber: Adagio (100th Anniversary)
Barbara Hendricks, Thomas Allen, Simon Rattle, Michael Tilson Thomas etc Warner 687 2862
Off the beaten track: Songs Cheryl Studer, Thomas Hampson, John Browning (piano) Deutsche Grammophon 435 8672
Best American composers: the postwar years
John Cage (1912-92)
Notorious for his ‘piece’, 4’33”, which involves a pianist goes through the ceremony of a performance of a three-movement work without playing a note, John Cage was a far more inventive composer than this one work might suggest. Essentially a restless and cerebral composer, he started as an admirer of Schoenberg, and took lessons with Cowell in 1933 in preparation for lessons with the great master.
However, Schoenberg’s decided opinion of Cage was that ‘he’s not a composer, but he's an inventor – of genius’. One positive outcome of Cage’s lessons with Cowell was his continuation of his teacher’s experiments in modifying the piano’s sound, adding various objects on or in-between its strings including screws and rubber bands, relishing the resulting gamelan-like sounds the piano produced when played.
'He’s not a composer, he's an inventor – of genius’ - Arnold Schoenberg on John Cage
Increasingly interested in dance and percussion, Cage took various teaching positions in San Francisco and Chicago before settling in New York in 1942, where he became music director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1944 until 1968 (Merce and John becoming personal as well as professional partners).
He also immersed himself in Eastern philosophies, and was inspired by Zen Buddhism to make ‘chance’ an important element in his music – hence his creation of 4’33” in 1952. He became friends with several leading avant garde composers including Pierre Boulez and Morton Feldman, and was revered by the avant-garde circle in Moscow during the Soviet era.
John Cage recommended recording
Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano
Boris Berman (piano) Naxos 8 554562
Lou Harrison (1917-2003)
Cage’s friend, Lou Harrison, was if anything even more inventive when it came to creating musical instruments, constructing attractively chiming gamelans out of sawn-off ends of gas canisters, and finding new methods of clavichord construction. His music blended Schoenbergian serialism with aleatoric procedures and used quarter tones and involving exotic instruments, often of his own invention. If any of this sounds forbidding, don’t be put off. His music is often gentle and enchanting, no matter how unfamiliar some of its sounds.
Where to start with Lou Harrison
Lou Harrison: A portrait
William Banovetz (oboe), Al Jarreau (vocals); California Symphony Orchestra/Barry Jekowsky Argo 455 5902
Leonard Bernstein (1918-90)
His composing genius was displayed above all in West Side Story (1957), a musical which manages both to be alarmingly challenging in terms of its edgy rhythms and level of violent dissonance yet capturing the flair and exuberance of youth and love in a style that made it a popular hit.
If Bernstein hadn’t spent so much of his career as a celebrity conductor, often appearing on TV and lecturing to promote the music he most cared for – notably works by Stravinsky, by such fellow Americans as Copland (whom Bernstein, who never had any formal compositional training, named as his ‘only real compositional teacher’), and above all Mahler – he might have written many more works of equal or even greater achievement. His early Jeremiah Symphony of 1942, commemorating the suffering of European Jews, is a striking work, and his brilliance shines in the musical On the Town (1944), the wry opera on middle class suburban life Trouble in Tahiti (1951) and, fitfully, in his interesting not-quite-hit Candide (1956) with its sparkling overture and its show aria ‘Glitter and be Gay’.
We named Bernstein's West Side Story one of the best stage musicals ever and the film versions one of the greatest film musicals of all time
Best West Side Story recording
West Side Story
(original Broadway cast recording) Sony
Off the beaten track: Trouble in Tahiti Soloists; Columbia Wind Ensemble/Leonard Bernstein Dutton 2CDLK4643
Ned Rorem (1923-2022)
Most widely celebrated for his songs (Susan Graham’s Ned Rorem album presents a well-varied selection, beautifully performed), Ned Rorem has also composed seven operas of which the most celebrated is Miss Julie, based on the play by Strindberg. Born in Richmond, Indiana, Rorem studied at the Curtis Institute and Juilliard School, and then with Virgil Thomson.
He gained renown with his song ‘The Lordly Hudson’, which in 1948 won a prize as best song of the year. He later won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for the orchestral suite Air Music. His piano sonatas, including No. 2 with its beguiling ‘Nocturne’, are also well worth investigating.
Ned Rorem recommended recording
Songs of Ned Rorem
Susan Graham (mezzo-soprano), Malcolm Martineau (piano) Erato 8573802222
Something a bit different:
Piano Sonatas Nos 1-3
Thomas Lanners (piano) Centaur CRC2874
Best American composers: 1960s and beyond
Morton Feldman (1926-1987)
Morton Feldman was a rather unconventional minimalist. Born and largely based in New York, Feldman was first inspired by the works of Schoenberg and Bartók, then was profoundly changed by his chance encounter with John Cage in 1950. The two young men had both attended a New York Philharmonic concert where they had both been bowled over by Webern’s Symphony, leaving before the Rachmaninov work started.
Feldman’s mature works – inspired by his friendship with Cage, and by the paintings of Jackson Pollock – generally are not about virtuosity, nor intended to illustrate anything. Rather, they are all about their own, unhurried processes, sometimes designed for particular acoustics such as that of the Rothko Chapel.
Morton Feldman recommended recording
Rothko Chapel
SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart/Rupert Huber Hänssler HAEN93023
George Crumb (1929-2022)
George Crumb continued and developed the ‘extended techniques’ pioneered by Henry Cowell, asking performers to play their instruments in unconventional ways to produce novel and evocative sounds. Yet Crumb’s music is anything but ‘abstract’. From the way it is written down – with staves curved and arranged to represent wheels, or a human eye – to the use of human voices and musical quotations loaded with significance, this is music which vividly captures emotional or psychological states.
A native of West Virginia, Crumb’s roots were essentially in rural America rather than in the city. Unlike his city colleagues, who tend to create sonic canvases to blot out the extraneous sounds of everyday urban life (or, as did Cage, draw attention to them), Crumb’s soundworld seems designed to complement the world in which it is conceived. It grows out of silence, and is meditative and dream-like, blending the familiar (whether it is instrumental sounds, or snatches of music by composers such as Schubert, Bartok or Mahler) with unfamiliar, and ranges in effect from ecstatic bell-like sounds to tenebrous nightmare.
George Crumb recommended recording
Makrokosmos Books I-III
Yoshiko Shimizu (piano) Kairos KAI0015029
Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021)
There are few composers and lyricists who have had as seismic an impact on the world of musical theatre as Stephen Sondheim. He has written the music and lyrics for some of Broadway’s finest musicals, from Company to Into the Woods, all of which have enjoyed enduring success and are still performed on amateur and professional stages the world over. As well as his solo musicals, he also worked with renowned composers as a lyricist, writing lyrics to the scores of West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959) by Leonard Bernstein and Jule Styne respectively.
- Stephen Sondheim memories: leading musicians and composers share their reflections on the Broadway legend
- Stephen Sondheim: his best musicals
In his early years, Sondheim trained with Oscar Hammerstein II (one half of the Rogers and Hammerstein duo), as well as the avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt. It was always songwriting that appealed to Sondheim most. ‘I’m interested in the theatre because I’m interested in communication with audiences’, he told NPR’s Fresh Air presenter Terry Gross in 2010. ‘Otherwise I would be in concert music. I love the theatre as much as I love music.’
His musicals differ hugely in style, subject matter and format, with some such as Company meditating on middle age and monogamy but described as Sondheim as a ‘non-plot’ musical, and others like Sunday in the Park with George inspired by a painting by Georges Suerat and set over 100 years. Awards came thick and fast, as Sondheim won the Tony and Drama Critics Circle Awards for Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods and Passion.
Steve Reich (b. 1936)
Steve Reich’s earliest works of the 1960s, based on sound recordings, include Come Out and It’s Gonna Rain, which tease out melodic or rhythmic patterns in ordinary speech. He also experimented in creating complex and ever-evolving rhythmic patterns through having a recording played fractionally faster or slower than its simultaneously playing duplicate. These early experiments have inspired many of his subsequent works for instrumental and vocal forces.
Reich's two most celebrated works are The Desert Music (1983) for chorus and orchestra, and Different Trains (1988) for string quartet and a sound recording of spoken interviews. For the latter work, various people around America and Europe were interviewed about their experiences leading up to and during the Second World War. In particular, the accounts contrast the passenger train service in the US with the forced train journeys to concentration camps. Building on his earlier experiments with sound recordings, Reich drew melodies out of the speech of those interviewees, integrating them into the textures of the string quartet.
Steve Reich recommended recording
Different Trains
Kronos Quartet Nonesuch 7559791762
Philip Glass (b. 1937)
Both the most famous and for some time the most notorious of the so-called minimalists, Philip Glass first appeared as the composer of simple and highly repetitive pieces, promoted by the Philip Glass ensemble he founded in 1968 in which he himself played keyboards. He has since established himself as America’s best-known opera composer, composing over a dozen works of which the most famous are Einstein on the Beach and Akhnaten, a DVD of which was an award-winner in 2022’s BBC Music Magazine Awards. He has also written several string quartets, of which the opening of No. 5 perhaps most decisively shows him breaking from his usual minimalist style to create something more dramatic and poignantly expressive.
Philip Glass recommended recording
Akhnaten (DVD)
Metropolitan Opera/Karen Kamensek Orange Mountain Music OMM5011
Something a bit different:
String Quartet No. 5
Kronos Quartet Nonesuch 7559793562
Best American composers: right up to the present
John Adams (b. 1947)
Though he loathes the label, John Adams first appeared as a ‘minimalist’ owing some debt to the example of Philip Glass’s music. Yet his music which first made an impression was of a more luxurious cast.
The Chairman Dances, an orchestral pendent to his first opera Nixon in China (1987), was his first big hit with its glamorous orchestration and Adams’s preparedness to indulge in Hollywoodian lusciousness. His ability to use harmonic tension and its resolution – old-fashioned techniques, but given an extra edge in their minimalist setting – had already been shown in earlier works such as Shaker Loops (1983) for string septet.
Brought up in a village in New Hampshire, Adams grew up with big-band swing (he got to sit briefly on the piano bench next to Duke Ellington one memorable summer), Broadway musicals and such European classics as Beethoven and Richard Strauss. After the initial shock of discovering avant-garde music at Harvard, for which he had the intense but short-lived enthusiasm of the recently converted, Adams revived the music he truly loved in his own work, and has not looked back since.
His operas, based invariably on recent historical events, have stirred controversy, most particularly The Death of Klinghoffer (1991) in its attempt to deal even-handedly with the Palestinian terrorists, and the Jewish people of whom the wheelchair-bound Klinghoffer is representative.
John Adams: recommended recording
The Chairman Dances; Short Ride in the Fast Machine, etc.
San Francisco Symphony/Edo de Waart Nonesuch 7559791442
John Luther Adams (b. 1953)
Long overshadowed by the ‘other’ John Adams, John Luther Adams has been very much on the rise since his breakthrough work Become Ocean (2013) won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014. An environmentalist as well as a composer, John Luther Adams spent a crucial 36 years living in Alaska, largely in an isolated cabin in a forest, enduring sub-zero temperatures.
Though in some ways it represented at least ten ‘lost’ years, since the lifestyle there was too gruelling for him to compose, it has heightened his sensitivity to nature and the natural acoustic and sounds of its environment. He first discovered his style in his 90-minute piece Earth and the Great Weather, composed in 1993 and subtitled ‘A Sonic Geography of the Arctic’.
John Luther Adams recommended recording
Become Ocean
Seattle Symphony/Ludovic Morlot Cantaloupe CA 21101
