Barrymore Laurence Scherer 
History of American Classical Music 

To many people, the term ‘American classical music’ means a handful of famous names: 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 unfamiliar: American Romantics like William Henry Fry, Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Edward Mac Dowell; 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.