Few would argue the premise that Leonard Bernstein’s music sounds prototypically American. Most of his works include numerous passages that would only have been written by someone from the United States, especially one active from the 1940s to the 1980s. His frequent cultivation of musical tropes associated with various types of jazz, blues, Tin Pan Alley, rock, Latin music, and concert music by the likes of Aaron Copland help make Bernstein’s interest in an American sound perhaps the single most significant factor that defines his musical style. This chapter considers how that style developed in terms of when and how he discovered and incorporated major American musical styles. The musical influences blend with other inspirations from Jewish music and Western concert music to render Bernstein one of the most eclectic composers of his generation.

If relatively modest in quantity, the chamber music of Amy Beach comprises a significant body of work that confronts meaningfully the churning countercurrents of her musical style. Chronologically, this repertoire falls into three groups, of which the first concentrates on works for violin and piano, culminating in the Violin Sonata, while in the second Beach explores a variety of other genres, including the piano quintet. The third and final group adds two late works, for piano trio and wind quintet. If this repertoire betrays clear enough references to Austro-Germanic traditions of chamber music, in particular to the music of Brahms (for example, Beach’s piano quintet exhibits examples of modeling from Brahms’s op. 34), it also reflects Beach’s ongoing efforts to expand the idea of American music, in part in answer to Dvorák’s “challenge” laid down in the “New World” Symphony. For Beach, the diversity of American music encouraged her to incorporate various popular sources, including Irish folk music and native Inuit music, into her own eclectic stylistic mixtures.