Skyscrapers

This is a re-release of the great disc that was for a very short time available on EMI. From its Colonial period to the present, music has played an important role in America's cultural and social well-being. With the introduction of the recording as a consumer product (coupled later with radio), America's music was brought to the masses. Since American music was now able to travel to places on a global scale, between the two World Wars, its influence - particularly in its popular and jazz forms - was strongly felt in Europe. As a counterpoint to jazz and bold avant-garde trends, composers like Howard Hanson, Randall Thompson, Roy Harris, William Grant Still, and younger composers like Morton Gould and Norman Dello Joio, for example, were developing a distinctively American symphonic school. This golden era witnessed an unprecedented flourishing that is beginning to be recognized and re-established in our current time. However, composers from that period were certainly not the first to receive national - if not international - recognition. Apart from John Alden Carpenter, whose music is clearly a product of the twentieth century, John Knowles Paine, Dudley Buck, Edward MacDowell, Arthur Foote, as well as a host of others, like Amy Beach, Gottschalk and Chadwick, were truly Romantic American composers. This disc makes a fine introduction to the music of the wonderful American composers from this period. The American conductor, Kenneth Klein, has an especial affinity for this music and the Orchestra plays gloriously for him.