Classical music of the United States

The first music of this type in America were the psalm books, such as the Ainsworth Psalter, brought over from Europe by the settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

of this period worked (like Benjamin West and the young Samuel Morse in painting) exclusively with European models, while others, such as William Billings, Supply Belcher, Daniel Read, Oliver Holden, Justin Morgan, Andrew Law, Timothy Swan, Jacob Kimball Jr., Jeremiah Ingalls, and John Wyeth, also known as the First New England School or Yankee tunesmiths, developed a native style almost entirely independent of the most prestigious European models, though it drew on the practice of West Gallery music composers such as William Tans'ur and Aaron Williams.

Academics view this development as pivotal in the history of American classical music because it established the characteristics that set it apart from its European ancestors.

The composers of the Second New England School included Paine's colleagues and students such as George Whitefield Chadwick, Amy Beach, Edward MacDowell, Arthur Foote, and Horatio Parker, who was the teacher of Charles Ives.

Ives was considered the last of the Second New England School composers although his music is viewed by some as one that still drew influence from European tradition mixed with modernism.

Leroy Anderson, Ferde Grofe, Morton Gould, and William Grant Still also composed pieces in the "symphonic jazz" vein.

Other composers adopted features of folk music, from the Appalachians, the plains and elsewhere, including Roy Harris, Elmer Bernstein, 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, and Henry Cowell.

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.

Composers such as Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and John Adams (composer) used experimental composition techniques such as drones, phasing, repeated motifs, sharp contrasts between mixed meters, simple but often abrupt movements between minor and major chords with the same root, contrasts between tonality and atonality, and a large amount of use of synthesizers to display the interplay of the fundamental building blocks of music: the cancellation and amplification of wavelengths that make up all acoustic and synthesized sound.