ABSTRACT
Several composers in the United States have continued in the post-World War II era to develop the general aesthetic and stylistic principles of the first generation of Boulanger students, thereby representing a thread within the multiplicity of trends that have characterized music of this country during the past half century. Among the diversity of early postwar American composers, including William Schuman, Vincent Persichetti, Vittorio Giannini, Peter Mennen, William Bergsma, Lucas Foss, George Crumb, Gunther Schuller, Leonard Bernstein, Elie Siegmeister, Samuel Barber, Kent Kennan, and such foreign-born composers as Gian-Carlo Menotti, Hugo Weisgall, Louise Talma, and Robert Starer, some have clearly drawn from early twentieth-century American trends. One or another of these composers have synthesized diverse traditional and contemporary approaches to form, texture, sonority, instrumental devices and techniques within contexts that range from modality and polytonality to more abstract pitch relations. William Schuman is one of the most representative of those that have attempted consciously to perpetuate and further develop inherently American features in their music. Siegmeister also adhered to a distinctly American style colored by jazz and folk music, while Bernstein absorbed these elements into a more popular idiom. The “third stream” compositions of Gunther Schuller (e.g., the Woodwind Quintet of 1958) and those of other contemporary composers in the United States represent a confluence of more general earlier tendencies that include jazz, Klangfarben, and twelve-tone serialism.
