American Classical Music - 20th Century

20th Century

In the early 20th century, George Gershwin was greatly influenced by African American music. He created a convincing synthesis of music from several traditions. Similarly inclined was Leonard Bernstein, who at times mixed non-tonal music with Jazz.

Many of the major classical composers of the 20th century were influenced by folk traditions, none more quintessentially, perhaps, than Charles Ives or Aaron Copland. Other composers adopted features of folk music, from the Appalachians, the plains and elsewhere, including Roy Harris, Elmer Bernstein, William Schuman, David Diamond, Elie Siegmeister, and others. Yet other early to mid-20th century composers continued in the more experimental traditions, including such figures as Charles Ives, George Antheil, John Cage and Henry Cowell.

It was during the 20th Century that film music was first created. Over the evolution of the cinema the music took on greater and greater sophistication. Significant composers of film music include Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Bernard Hermann, Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams.

The 20th Century also saw important works published by such significant immigrant composers as Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg who came to America for a variety of reasons, including political persecution, aesthetic freedom and economic opportunity.

In the 1980s, after a period during which self-defined American "classical" composers like John Cage adopted atonal structures, Philip Glass revived tonality and traditional genres, such as opera in works like Einstein on the Beach. Glass helped create a mass market for "classical" music after audiences outside of the avant-garde had simply generally refused Modernist, atonal music.

A pessimist model, shared by Aldous Huxley and Theodor Adorno, of the classical tradition in Europe was that it peaked with Beethoven. Aldous Huxley believed that subsequent classical music was vulgarized with the re-entry of the unsublimated erotic and Adorno believed that commodification entered with Wagner. "American classical music" flourished much after Beethoven. Some might say, beyond the pessimism of European sentimentalities.