Contemporary American Composers

Rupert Hughes was twenty-eight when he set out to survey what American music actually was, and the result covers composers working in the United States around 1900, nearly all of them still living. He sorts them into chapters: the Innovators (Edward MacDowell, Ethelbert Nevin, John Philip Sousa), the Academics (John Knowles Paine, Horatio W. Parker, George Chadwick, Arthur Foote), the Colonists, the Women Composers (Mrs. H. H. A. Beach, Margaret Ruthven Lang), and the Foreign Composers. Finding the existing writing on native composers scarce, incomplete and biased, Hughes built the book from his own research, studying thousands of pieces from short songs to orchestral scores. He argued that a national school would grow out of cosmopolitanism rather than the arbitrary seizure of some musical dialect, and that American composers had earned real criticism rather than coddling.