• 13-digit ISBN: 978-1-84379-282-6
• Barcode: 9781843792826
• Approximate length: 50,000 words
• Formats: iPad/iPhone (enhanced), Kindle, Nook, Kobo

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. 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 MacDowell; 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. Audio samples are contained in the text: just tap to listen while you read.

About the Author

Barrymore Laurence Scherer, a native New Yorker, is a music critic for The Wall Street Journal and a contributing editor of Art & Auction magazine. On radio, he has been a commentator for NPR’s Performance Today. Named a Speaker in the Humanities by the New York Council for the Humanities, he has taught on ‘Oscar Wilde and the Belle Epoque’ at Sarah Lawrence College, and as an independent scholar he has lectured extensively on opera, classical music, and the Victorian age for Lincoln Center Great Performers, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic as well as at venues around the country. In addition, as a scriptwriter and actor he writes and does voiceover work. Mr Scherer is also author of the critically acclaimed book Bravo! A Guide to Opera for the Perplexed. With his wife and their dog he lives amidst a gratifying number of kindred spirits in Westchester, New York.