The history of American music writing – essays on music, criticism, reviews, pamphlets – is told in this chapter, beginning in the nineteenth century, when an identifiably American music still had not fully coalesced. The early twentieth century saw the arrival of strong music advocates and composer-writers who sought to create innovative music and write prolifically about these new sounds, for which they had become de facto evangelists. Early American music writers underscored the differences between American and European music. Essays on music took on an increasingly pedagogical function, teaching their readers about the intricacies and sometimes hidden features of new compositions. The earliest American music writing focused on classical music, but as jazz entered the scene, with its complex rules and unfamiliar rhythms and chord structures, a new cohort of essayists developed a language for writing about this American artform. Throughout the century, a more personal tone emerged in the music essay as composers, musicians, and music connoisseurs began to articulate their feelings, impressions, memories, and individual experiences.

This chapter follows up on Chapter 3 by presenting nine portraits of works for multiple orchestras or for an orchestra divided into spatialized groups composed, premiered or reprised between 1958 and 1978 by Henry Brant, Henri Dutilleux, Gunther Schuller, Luigi Nono, Toshiro Mayuzumi, Gilles Tremblay, Harry Somers, Charles Ives and Anthony Braxton. These works were premiered in New York, Boston, Paris, Darmstadt, Toronto and Tokyo. The common features of these works invite their being studied as a group, focusing on the ways composers and critics characterized these works premiered in the heyday of both post-war avant-gardism and the public dissemination of stereo hi-fis, thereby creating points of contact with the works discussed in the previous chapter.