A History of American Classical Music

by Barrymore Laurence Scherer

To many people, the term “American classical music” means a handful of famous Gershwin, Copland, Bernstein, Sousa. But this doesn’t begin to scrape the surface of a musical heritage reaching back to colonial times. For instance, did you know that George Washington loved dance music, and that Abraham Lincoln’s favorite song was “Listen to the Mocking-Bird” by the American composer Septimus Winner? America’s legacy of concert music contains extraordinary riches, much of it unfamiliar even to sophisticated music lovers. This entertaining, fact-filled History of American Classical Music celebrates that legacy by investigating the greatest composers familiar and American Romantics like William Henry Fry, Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Edward MacDowell; visionary modernists like Charles Ives, Morton Feldman and John Cage; buoyant spirits like Victor Herbert and Scott Joplin; as well as figures at today’s cutting edge like John Adams, Philip Glass, Michael Torke and Carter Pann.

256 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 28, 2012

Reviews

[John Licari · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn’t have high expectations of this book. It’s in the title. I enjoyed tracing American classical music and its identity thoroughly.