Music

European art music, especially sacred song, came to the American colonies with the settlers. The first major American composer is Billings, composer of an important body of sacred choral music that focuses on the anthem and fuging tune. These and similar works enjoyed wide later dissemination in shape-note notation. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, upper-class American musicians continued to go to Europe and compose along European models. But there developed, as well, an important popular and semi-classical repertoire: e.g. the songs of Foster and marches of Sousa. The African slaves brought a musical culture, of course; from African American music grew the most significant American style: jazz, of which Joplin's piano rags are an imporant precusor. New Orleans jazz flourished in the 1920s and spread quickly along the Mississippi and to Chicago. White musicians absorbed its elements in the big-band repertoire and in the songs of Gerswhin, Porter, and Berlin.

Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess is the most successful fusion of American popular and classical elements. The Broadway musical also had strong influence on the national style, notably the work of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Bernstein's West Side Story.

Among the major American composers to excel in more-or-less classical idioms were the eccentric Ives, Copland (notaly the ballets), Piston, Sessions, and Elliott Carter.

In popular music, African American musicians in the 1950s developed the bebop style of high virtuosity and experimental harmony and rhythm. The 1960s brought the rock revolution.