Do you know any American style pieces?

[jimf]

Hi there! I am very interested in pieces resembling the American folk music e.g. like the country music style... However the only composers I know that have such music are Joplin (with his rags), Gottschalk, Copland (of course, who else?    ) and Dvorak with his symphonies, suites and humoresques. Also if you listen carefully to some Heller's etudes (especially op. 45), you'll notice some very subtle similarities...
Any other composers or works by other composers resembling this style? Even not only for piano!
Thanks in advance,
Jim

[thalbergmad]

There are a few by Herz, De Meyer, Thalberg and Rubinstein who all wrote pieces for their American tours.

Thal

[ahinton]

Any serious consideartion of this question needs to take on board the observations made - quite independently of one another, as far as I know - by the American composers Virgil Thomson and Elliott Carter; Thomson said that "the way to write American music is simple; all you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish" and here's an extract from an interview with Carter from several years ago by Frank J. Oteri:

FO: Do you think there is an American music? Is there such a thing?

EC: American music?

FO: Yeah, do you identify as being an American composer?

EC: No. It seems to me that being an American is just plain being. I am an American because I'm a human and been part of our society for all these years. 93 years. That's American. I've voted more or less intelligently…not always… and been educated mostly in this country and read American authors…all that. I don't see any point in saying I'm going to be an American composer. I am an American composer. What I do is making America. We are producing our country day-by-day and year-by-year; sometimes not to well I must say.

FO: An American Spirit or sound?

EC: My music doesn't sound like anybody else's music that I'm aware of. I guess that's American.

Later in the same interview, there was this exchange

FO: You had a very strong reaction to the [Ives] Concord sonata.

EC: Oh yes, it's wonderful - especially the first and last movements. The thing that bothers me all the time about Ives is, as far as I'm concerned, I don't like his quotations from other kinds of music because from my point of view if you want to express let's say something about America, you don't do it by quoting "Yankee Doodle". You do it by writing by what you feel about it. You don't take somebody else's music and stick it in there.

So - perhaps beware of taking about "American style pieces"!...

Best,

Alistair

[redbaron]

I believe Dvorak's Humoresques Op 101 were written in an American style. They're all wonderful pieces and might come as a nice surprise if the only Dovrak piano piece you've heard is the Humoresque in G flat.

[jimf]

Thank you all and, redbaron, I have already played all of the Humoresques by Dvorak and I utterly adore them!!! 

[jayeckz]

I'm surprised Barber's Excursions haven't been mentioned.

[worov]

What about Gershwin ?

[49410enrique]

thinking taking a look at stride would be worthwhile. It's considered one of the first truely original American music styles for the piano ( rag was mentioned as was 'jazz' in the Gerswin reply) but stride isn't quite rag and it's not quite what we think of as jazz, sort of falls between ,
some notable examples
James Price Johnson Carolina Shout (1918/1921), Mule Walk (1939), Caprice Rag
 
Thomas "Fats" Waller Handful of Keys (1929), Vipers Drag (1934), Alligator Crawl (1934)
 
Willie "The Lion" Smith Finger Buster (1931), Echoes Of Spring (1939)

also Macdowell's Op. 62 New England Idylls (1902) set of pieces for piano comes to mind as 'american'.

edit
fyi
Like its forebear, ragtime piano, stride piano is highly rhythmic and somewhat percussive in nature because of the "oom-pah" (alternating bass note / chord) action of the left hand. In the left hard, the pianist usually plays a single bass note, or a bass octave or tenth, followed by a chord, while the right hand plays syncopated melody lines with characteristically blues-based embellishments and fill patterns.
 
James P. Johnson, known as the "Father of Stride", created this unique style of jazz piano along with fellow pianists Willie "The Lion" Smith, Fats Waller and Luckey Roberts. Johnson's greatest contribution was to recast the "straight" feeling of ragtime with a more modern, swinging beat.[1] He discovered and employed the tenth or "broken tenth" interval to introduce more swing in his left hand. This can be heard in his famous composition "Carolina Shout". The pianist could not only substitute tenths for single bass notes, but could also play broken (staggered) tenths up and down the keyboard[2] in scale fashion—an innovation that subsequently inspired boogie-woogie and the eventual transition to modern four-beat jazz.