American classical music is music written in the United States but in the European classical music tradition. In many cases, beginning in the 18th century, it has been influenced by American folk music styles; and from the 20th century to the present day it has often been influenced by folk, jazz, blues, and pop styles.Jazz music is sometimes referred to as American classical music, mainly by jazz musicians. They feel that, being as jazz originated in America, jazz is the true American classical music.

If “classical” can be taken to mean what it often in fact means, “serious”, then the earliest American classical music consists of part-songs used in religious services during Colonial times. The first music of this type in America were the psalm books, such as the Ainsworth Psalter, brought over from Europe by the settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The first music publication in English-speaking North America — indeed the first publication of any kind — was the Bay Psalm Book of 1640.

Many American composers of this period worked (like Benjamin West and the young Samuel Morse in painting) exclusively with European models, while others, such as William Billings, Supply Belcher, Daniel Read, Oliver Holden, and Justin Morgan, also known as the First New England School, developed a native style almost entirely independently of European models. Many of these composers were amateurs, and many were singers: they developed new forms of sacred music, such as the fuguing tune, suitable for performance by amateurs, and often using harmonic methods which would have been considered bizarre by contemporary European standards. Some of the most unusual innovators were composers such as Anthony Philip Heinrich, who received some formal instrumental training but were entirely self-taught in composition. Heinrich traveled extensively throughout the interior of the young United States in the early 19th century, recording his experiences with colorful orchestral and chamber music which had almost nothing in common with the music being composed in Europe. Heinrich was the first American composer to write for symphony orchestra, as well as the first to conduct a Beethoven symphony in the United States (in Lexington, Kentucky in 1817).

In the early 20th century, George Gershwin was greatly influenced by African American classical music however, this was during an era of legally enforced Jim Crow racial segregation during which his music perhaps enjoyed undue fame owing to the refusal of white listeners to listen to music that formed Gershwin’s sources.On the other hand, he created a convincing synthesis of music from several traditions once considered to be irreconcilable, and which continues to enjoy enormous popularity.In the 1980s, after a period during which self-defined American “classical” composers like John Cage adopted atonal structures and thought of themselves less American than Modern composers, Philip Glass revived tonality and traditional genres, such as opera in works like Einstein on the Beach. Glass re-created a semi-mass market for “classical” music, made in America because audiences outside of an avant-garde had simply refused to sit still for Modernist, atonal music, whether from America or Europe.

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