RFI= American Classickal Muzik

Include forerunners, like Appalachian Music, if you think I should try out that *shit* as well.

nixon in china - John Adams
sonata for prepared piano - john cage
music for trains - steven reich
black angels - george crumb
gertude steins opera
shaker loops =- john adams

Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, more recently Moondog, Harry Partsch

This is a biiiiig category Helen, but I'd say you can't really go wrong w/ a bit of Morton Feldman. And SYR4, 'Goodbye 20th Century', includes pieces by American composers like Christian Wolff (the magnificent 'Burdocks'), Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Reich, James Tenney etc. Might be a good way in (or not - I'm no expert!)

Charles Ives: I find his symphonies total bores, but his short pieces are ERUPTIVE. This includes Central Park in the Dark, The Unanswered Question, The Fourth of July, which I think are easily gotten on Leonard Bernstein LPs, and From the Steeples and the Mountaintops, available only on a long out-of-print Nonesuch compilation called American Brass Music.

Aaron Copland: You can't get more American than Leonard Bernstein conducting Copland's works...unless it's Bernstein conducting Gershwin's works.

Edgar Varese: IIRC, you can get most of his stuff on two-disc sets, he wasn't prolific, but me, I always prefer the earthy tape manipulation piece Poeme Electronique.

Virgil Thomson: The things he did with Gertrude Stein are goofy as fuck. In a good way.

Harry Partch: I really don't know which ones. The short songs I've heard on WNYC are rambling insanity.

Samuel Barber: Adagio for Strings = Music from Platoon. Knoxville 1915 is daydreamy.

John Cage: We've been through this already, haven't we? I have no feel for his prepared piano stuff (though you may feel differently). I guess if there's any piece which sounds interesting in theory, that's the one you buy. The kids today seem to like Indeterminacy, go figure.

Conlon Nancarrow: ERUPTIVE is also a good word for his Studies for Player Piano. It's got some relatively "pop" pieces on it which sound like 4D boogie-woogie, so it might be a good bridge

George Crumb: Black Angels. Hell on earth. The Kronos Quartet album of the same name has...holy crud, it's got a Tallis motet! (Sory, just talking to myself.)

Moondog: The first recording of his "Theme" (I don't know which album it is. It's been recorded a couple times.) is quite possibly the earliest multi-track recording of anything, ever, and it's sublime.

Phillip Glass: The early stuff, I suppose. I love the fast, Stereolabby parts of Einstein on the Beach.

OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music is not only great, it's inordinately American as well. God, I love this country. Buy it, and explore from there.

Tony Conrad: His electric violin pieces begin great but wear on my nerves after a while. Try and find the bootlegged LaMonte Young stuff on your file-sharing program of choice instead.

Morton Feldman: I only know the Rothko Chapel/Why Patterns? albums, but what a doozy. Extreme minimalist quietude.

Terry Riley: In C is the canonical minimalist piece.

Steve Reich: Unless Music for Eighteen Musicians is. You can talk about all its Indian and Indonesian and African roots, but at times, it's almost absurdly grand and jazzy and...Broadway!

Harold Budd: OK, more minimalism. The Oak of the Gold Dreams and Coeur D'Orr are some of the only music I've ever REALLY tranced-out over.

Charlemagne Palestine: Four Manifestations On Six Elements may be the best album, ever.

A couple of smaller names, though still neat:

Ellen Taafe Zwilich: Very traditionally-minded composer, but certainly using recent (ie, in the last 100 hundred years or so) ideas about harmony and arrangement. Try her string quartet, or first symphony. I also heard a very good trumpet concerto she did, but the name escapes me now.

Mary Jeanne Van Appledorn: Another interesting composer taking traditional forms (fugue, sonata form) but injecting them with modern tonal and orchestration concepts. And of her works for small wind ensembles are great, and she also did a nice thing with "Encantations", for harp and trumpet.

There's also this guy named Zorn.

Oh, how on earth could I have possibly forgotten the tape-loop stuff collected on Steve Reich's Early Works? A screaming comes across the sky.

tod dockstader was american right? search: quartermass.

interesting side question: do the recent john cale "reissues" on tote = american classical or american rock? eh? EH?

Man you guys... there is MUCH MORE to American Classical Music than MINIMALISTS and POST-FLUXUS composers....yeah, Dont rule out pre-war composers also.

John Phillip Sousa? Remember him?

There are many schools of thought in the realm of the high-brow world of "classical" musics, regarding it's American tendrils.

And if you get rid of the high art aesthetic altogether, you'll find an even more pregnant group of composers in America.

woo woo!

True o gage-o (and sousa roXoR, for he invented jazz) but if someone says AMERICAN CLASSICAL MUSIC and you say YAY Stone Temple Pilots you are being wilful.

"doesn't this band know anything that wasn't written by john phillip souza?"
"you mean something just arranged by souza"?
etc., etc.

and yes, i spelled it wrong on purpose.

Sousa didn't invent jazz. It was Scott Joplin. Or maybe James Reese Europe. And I don't know nuthin about any of 'em.

Sousa didn't invent jazz.
No, he invented Monty Python, though.

I'm not huge on classical of any kind, let alone American, but I wholeheartedly second (or was it third?) the recommendation of Kronos Quartet's Black Angels album.

Harry Partch - 17 Lyrics of Li Po (Tzadik) - microtonal settings of ancient Chinese poetry (in English translation) accompanied by tenor violin, well-recorded sensitive performance

Carl Stone - Mom's - a good selection of electro-acoustic works by Stone- combines rock/pop, whale songs, chopped up vocal samples, much more...

LaMonte Young - Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer - meditative minimalist piece for 8 trumpets features remarkable upper harmonic effects

Also: Peter Garland "Days Run Away", John Zorn "Songs from Hermetic Theater", Morton Feldman "Three Voices", Philip Glass "Glassworks", Harry Partch "Enclosure Two"

Morton Felman= His music is quiet, but it is not built upon the repeating patterns of minimalists like reich. His music is far more enjoyable than minimalists (listen to Coptic light).

Did anyone listen to radio 3 on Friday? The BBC symphony orchestra played 3 of feldmans pieces live. There was also a short doc and an interview recorded in the 80s. Very enjoyabe.

I find most of Morton Feldman verging on soporific. Unlike Milton Babbitt, who, for some reason, I keep thinking of when I say Morton Feldman. And does Korngold count? If we count Varese, who was originally a Parisian, how about a former Austrian?

I like Alan Hovhaness' music, It can be very beautiful/cosmic, tho' it is a little twee at times. There is a CD called "Celestial Gate" which is very good. No doubt google will tell U more. Schuman's (note - 1 "n" not 2) symphony for strings is rather nice too.

Morton Subotnik - The Wild Bull. I'm assuming he's American.

Also try: Lou Harrison. The CRI "Music of Lou Harrison" is a pretty good collection. It includes three pieces for gamelan and the Kronos Quartet playing a string quartet. Also "The Perilous Chapel" on a CD of the same name (on the New Albion label) is particularly good, though the rest of the CD is just okay. "Music for Guitar and Percussion" (on the Etcetera label--probably out of print now) performed by John Schneider on "well-tempered guitar" is nice, though pretty mellow compared to some of the more avant-garde things mentioned above.

There is a musique concrete composer named Anne MacMillan (not sure of spelling) who did a recording I'd like to get called "Gateway Summer Sounds," one of the more memorable musique concrete recordings I've heard. (Except I'm not 100% sure she's American.) Studied with Stockhausen. I second Varese, Nancarrow, and Reich (and Cage, but with more misgivings).

Frederic Rzewski used to be more of a favorite, but I still like him to some extent. "The People United Will Never Be Defeated!: 36 Variation on a Chilean Song" still holds some interest. I used to like "Coming Together" a lot, but I'm afraid it subverts its serious political intent by drifting into melodrama. "Attica is in Front of Me" is maybe more successful, thought it's been years since I've heard it, so I can hardly comment.

Re: Terry Riley. I'm sure some will disagree, but I think of "In C" as being more historically interesting than actually interesting to listen to. My favorite Terry Riley is "Shri Camel," though it is not necessarily presented as growing out of the classical tradition. It's performed on an electronic organ, using just intonation, and it draws on European classical and Indian classical approaches. He recorded a couple other works similar to this one: "Descending Moonshine Dervishes" and "Persian Surgery Dervishes." (Where does he get these dopey names?) I have not heard either of them for a while.

(Also, do check out that Cage essay called something like "On the Future of Music" in the book Empty Words. He mentions a lot of these composers there, along with some others.)

In addition to what's been mentioned so far (Michael Daddino's choices are mostly top-notch):

Elliot Carter - first 3 string quartets
Milton Babbitt - Philomel
La Monte Young - Well-Tuned Piano
Theatre of Eternal Music jams like "Early Tuesday Morning Blues," "The Fire Is a Mirror," etc
Terry Riley - "Bird of Paradise"
John Cage - "The Seasons," "Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra," number pieces
Philip Glass - "Two Pages," "Music In Similar Motion"
George Crumb - Makrokosmos
Steve Reich - Tehillim
Alan Licht - Sink the Aging Process
Glenn Branca - 3rd, 5th, and 6th symphonies
Music by Phill Niblock
Maryanne Amacher - Sound Characters

Helen - if you follow Michael Daddino's suggestions (and in order, but get to Feldman a bit quicker) and add some Gershwin and Elliott Carter you can't go wrong really.

One great piece nobody's yet mentioned, and truly "classical" in style, is Roy Harris' 3rd Symphony. You'll find it often paired on record with orchestral works by Gershwin, Bernstein or Ives.

See also separate threads on Copland, Cage, Glass and Reich for more recommendations.

Meredith Monk - Dolmen Music

Meredith Monk - Dolmen Music

Yes, yes, yes. I was thinking of mentioning that. I didn't because I was wonderng if Monk was classically trained. She seems more like a jack of all trades (well, music and dance anyway) rather than a modern classical composer, but at the very least that seems to be the handiest category for her. I saw her in a small live performance once (in addition to a larger theatrical work, "Atlas") and was a little disappointed that she seemed to be presenting her music as something more comic than it had been in my mind.

Curiously, a store near me files her under "jazz," but they probably don't have anywhere else to put her.

I like "Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 9" by Henry Cowell. It is from quite late on in his career. I think he is better known for his early work. Cowell was a major figure in American music. He was one of John Cage's teachers.

It seems to me that a disproportionately large number of the most interesting American composers whose careers began in the first half of the last century, were either gay or bisexual. Examples:

John Cage Henry Cowell Harry Partch Lou Harrison

Am I missing any others? Maybe the reason this strikes me is that for a long time I was not aware that any of them were, except for Harrison.

Also, these four were particularly interested, at one point or another, in non-western music.

In NY I found a book on the subject: Struble wrote it. Only cost me about seven dollars. I find the chapter extremely interesting.

this is a stretch, but since the thread title doesn't specify *North* America i could mention Hector Villa-Lobos. are there any other big names in Latin American classical music i should know about?

Yes, yes, yes. I find my saying this really grotesque and aomehow false in tone.

Not that I don't like Meredith Monk, I just don't say things like that. (Sorry to pointlessly dredge this up, but I was seeing if I had missed any new Monk discussions. Maybe someone will see this thread for the first time and have something to say on the general topic.)