Includes music by MacDowell, Foote, Chadwick, Beach, Ives, Sousa, Joplin, Gershwin, Copland, Schuman, Barber, Cage, Bernstein, Carter, Glass, Adams and many others.

Think 'American classical music' and what names spring to mind? Gershwin, Copland, Bernstein? Scott Joplin, Stephen Foster, John Philip Sousa? These composers deserve their worldwide popularity. But from colonial times to our time, America's concert legacy also contains riches unfamiliar even to sophisticated music lovers. This entertaining, fact-filled Story of American Classical Music celebrates that legacy. An authoritative booklet investigates the greatest composers familiar and unfamiliar: American Romantics like Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Edward MacDowell, visionary modernists like Charles Ives and John Cage, buoyant spirits like Sousa, Joplin and Ferde Grofé, as well as figures at today's cutting edge like John Adams, Philip Glass and Michael Torke. Setting their work against America's tempestuous history, the essay is illustrated by over two hours of selected masterpieces.