By Dr. Bjorn Mercer
Program Director, Communication, Humanities, Music, Philosophy, Religion and World Languages Programs, American Public University
This article is Part III of a six-part series on the popularity of classical music.
The United States has some truly great composers who have contributed to the classical music repertoire. U.S.-born composers have been creating music starting in the late 1830s to 1860s with the so-called Second New England School with the likes of John Knowles Paine, George Whitefield Chadwick, Arthur Foote, Edward MacDowell, Eleanor Sophia Smith, Horatio Parker and Amy Beach.
These composers were all born in the U.S., trained in Europe, mostly by Germans, and were active in the northeast, specifically in Boston. On a side note, the First New England School loosely describes American-born songwriters from the late 18th century who wrote such as William Billings.
The next generation of composers after the Second New England School is where we start getting U.S. composers whose music is remembered today and whose training was more varied. The list includes a wider range of people who represent America. To start, there are many articles on the top American composers and in almost all of them include traditional classical composers such as Aaron Copland, jazz composers such as Duke Ellington, and film and Broadway composers such as Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers.
Having classically trained and jazz composers on the list is uniquely American. When you look at other lists of top composers, the French, German, Italian, and Russian lists include, for the most part, only classical composers. They are musicians who were trained in the classical tradition, worked in the classical field (for the most part), wrote for classical ensembles, and made their living, or major hobby, with classical music. Of course, when you look at the European countries’ lists, they go back over 500 years, while the lists of American top composers only go back to the mid- to late-19th century.
Top American Composers
To get an idea of who are the top American composers, we will look at a few lists on the internet. The first list comes from Gramophone, the famous record label that now has an active classical music website.
● Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein and Charles Ives
● John Adams and Philip Glass
● Steve Reich
● John Cage
● George Gershwin
● Eric Whitacre
The next list comes from Classic FM, a classical music radio station with a great website that has a global reach:
● Leonard Bernstein
● John Williams
● Igor Stravinsky
● Eric Whitacre
● Philip Glass
● Elmer Bernstein
● Steve Reich
● Samuel Barber
The last list comes from Ranker, a website that allows users to vote for their favorite composers (composer rankings may change over time):
· George Gershwin
· Aaron Copland
· Samuel Barber
· Leonard Bernstein
· Charles Ives
· Duke Ellington
Starting with Ranker, it makes sense that George Gershwin is the most popular American composer on a poll that ranks composers based on popularity. Gershwin is always the most “exciting” of the composers with his accessible form of jazz, his charisma, his interesting life and story, and his unfortunate death at the young age of 38.
Because of his “Rhapsody in Blue” and “An American in Paris,” Gershwin’s popularity has been in the consciousness of Americans because these works have been used in film, TV, advertisements, and in regular classical concerts (especially pop concerts). His fame rightfully is also based on his Broadway offerings including “Lady Be Good,” “Oh, Kay!,” “Funny Face,” his “Concerto in F,” and of course, his opera “Porgy and Bess.”
Coupled with Gershwin, Aaron Copland is often at the top of most polls about American composers and is ranked either number one or two on Ranker depending on the day. Aaron Copland is one of those American composers who found his fame after World War I, studied in France with Nadia Boulanger and was one of the proponents of the “American” sound of classical music. His fame rests on many pieces but his more famous works include his ballets “Rodeo,” “Billy the Kid,” “Appalachian Spring” and his “Fanfare for the Common Man.”
Now, should Gershwin and Copland be ranked number one and two? I will answer this with a no and an explanation. Any of the top six composers on the Ranker list can be listed as number one, two, three, four, five or six. These six composers — Gershwin, Copland, Barber, Bernstein, Ives, and Ellington — are almost always rated as the most popular American composers in the U.S. and on the global classical music scene.
Samuel Barber, like Copland, is one of the more straightforward classical composers who has many works that are popular in the American concert halls. Although not as well-known as Copland, his “Adagio for Strings” is known by anyone who has watched films over the last three decades. In addition, “The School for Scandal,” “Music for a Scene from Shelley,” “Essay for Orchestra,” “Second Essay for Orchestra” and “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” are all popular works still performed.
Charles Ives is the one composer on this list who is truly unique among his American classical peers. Ives is more of a contemporary of members of the latter part of the Second New England school being compositionally active in the first two decades of the 1900s and then largely not composing by the 1920s.
Compared to the other top five composers Ives’s compositions are not often performed today because they are adventurous and push the limits of form, instrumentation, and dissonance. They were ahead of their time by almost 50 years. Some of Ives’s important works include his “Symphony No. 2,” “Central Park in the Dark,” the “Unanswered Question” and “Three Places in New England”.
Igor Stravinsky made an interesting statement about Ives in 1966: “Poly-tonality; atonality; tone clusters; tone rows; multiple orchestras; a rhythmic vocabulary which maintains a lead on the avant-garde even now; micro-intervals; perspectivism effects; chance; statistical composition; permutation; add-a-part, practical-joke, and improvisatory music: these were Ives’s discoveries a half-century ago as he quietly set about devouring the contemporary cake before the rest of us even found a seat at the same table.”
Duke Ellington, the only jazz composer in the top six, is truly an American icon. Because Ellington comes from the jazz tradition, he is not always on the American classical composers lists. But including jazz within the American tradition of classical music is not only important, but necessary.
Jazz is America’s only unique contribution to world music. Including jazz as a substantial art is assumed today versus in the middle of the 20th century when jazz was still considered “popular” music and jazz musicians were discounted by the classical “elite.”
Ellington’s music ranges over a 50+ year career that includes pop songs such as “Black and Tan Fantasy” and “Caravan,” extending to symphonic works such as “Harlem”, and film scores such as “Anatomy of a Murder.” Duke Ellington’s music and his personality looms large in the American ethos and his inclusion among the greatest American composers is more than justified.
If there is one composer in the top six who could be replaced by someone else, it is Leonard Bernstein. A great deal of his fame rests on his large personality and his decades as conductor and face of the New York Philharmonic.
Although Bernstein found great fame with “West Side Story,” his opus is not as full as the other composers; nor does his compositional influence loom large over his contemporaries or the subsequent generation of composers unlike Copland, Gershwin, Ives, and Ellington.
In the next part of the series “Popular Classical Music,” we will look at the many other famous American composers of the last 100 years.
About the Author
Dr. Bjorn Mercer is a Program Director. He holds a bachelor’s degree in music from Missouri State University, a master’s and doctorate in music from the University of Arizona, and an MBA from the University of Phoenix. He writes about culture, leadership, and why the humanities and liberal arts are critical to career success. Dr. Mercer also writes children’s music.
