Best known as the developer of SCORE, the first music notation software program, Leland Smith created a body of musical compositions before turning his focus to computers.

Born in 1938 into a musical family, John Harbison studied at Harvard, and with Roger Sessions at Princeton. He is one of America's most accomplished musicians, with four symphonies, three operas and a Pulitzer Prize-winning cantata to his credit.

James Lentini' compositions have been described as 'ome of the most alluring contemporary music you're apt to find' by veteran music critic John Guinn. Orchestra Hall Suite honors the venerable home of the Detroit Symphony.

David Gompper is an award-winning composer and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020. His luminously orchestrated and expressive works have attracted admiration throughout the US, Europe and beyond. Opening with relentless energy, the second movement of the Cello Concerto is spectral and dreamlike, while the Double Bass Concerto explores the light effects of a solar eclipse, using the soloist to suggest shadows, auras and glimpses of sound. A partner work to Sunburst (8.559835), the multi-layered Moonburst reflects the transformational imagery of nocturnal sounds and perceptions. David Gompperhas lived and worked professionally as a pianist, a conductor, and a composer in New York, San Diego, London, Nigeria, Michigan, Texas and Iowa. In 2002-03 Gompper was in Russia as a Fulbright Scholar, teaching, performing and conducting at the Moscow Conservatory. In 2009 he received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City, and a Fromm Commission in 2013. Gompper's compositions have been performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and Merkin Halls (New York), Wigmore Hall (London), the Konzerthaus (Vienna) and the Bolshoi and Rachmaninov Halls (Moscow Conservatory).

MCKAY: Suite for Viola and Piano / My Tahoe Window / An Apri

The winner of many prestigious awards for composition, Samuel Adler is also Professor emeritus at the Eastman School of Music. His Canto series was written to meet the challenge of providing concert etudes for every orchestral instrument. This program presents the complete Cantos for solo string instruments, exploring the great possibilities in each instrument from virtuoso feats to lyrical poignancy, 'moody' pensiveness to sharply observed wit and humor. The duet Close Encounters expresses ecstatic feelings of love, while the string trio Five Snapshots reflects contrasting scenes of nature. Samuel Adler's of Musique and a selection of other chamber works can be found on Naxos 8.559602. His Fifth Symphony can be heard on 8.559415.

American composer and pianist Paul Schoenfield is at the keyboard for two searing, heart-piercing works commissioned by Music of Remembrance.

The works on this disc are representative of Harold Meltzer' unique sensibility, profound imagination and inquisitive musical mind, quickened both by the things of the world and by a wide range of music, including the works of Franco Donatoni.

Between the Bliss and Me is a wonderful collection of musical settings of poems by the great American poet, Emily Dickinson. The CD gathers compositions which might be familiar to some listeners, particularly the settings composed by Aaron Copland, but there are also works by lesser known composers such as Ernst Bacon, John Duke, Arthur Farwell, Scott Gendel, Lori Laitman and Richard Pearson-Thomas which add an extra dimension to Dickinson's genius. Unlike most modern art song, the songs on this CD have a refreshing melodic quality.

Irving Berlin was one of the first and one of the most prolific of tunesmiths who wrote for the Broadway stage and for Hollywood musicals. Furthermore, like Cole Porter but unlike the majority of tunesmiths who worked with lyricists, Berlin wrote both tunes and lyrics. Here we have 19 of his most popular tunes in instrumentals arranged for brass bands. The band in question is the Chestnut Brass Company, founded in Philadelphia in 1977. Most of the tunes are up-tempo, but there are also some more wistful tracks like 'When I lost you', 'What'll I do?' and 'They say it's wonderful'. No Berlin collection would be complete of course without 'White Christmas', which sounds surprisingly poignant in this mellow brass arrangement.

The unique qualities of the American trumpet tradition are celebrated in this wide-ranging disc. From the drama of Leo Eylar's dazzling Dance Suite to the wit of William McKinley's Miniature Portraits, virtuosity and brilliance are assured. The two songs from Sondheim's musical Sweeney Todd, orchestrated by McKinley with the composer's consent, convey a quality of ardent determination. Jeffrey Silberschlag is the dedicatee of a number of these works and he carries on the illustrious lineage of American trumpeters. He is partnered by Gerard Schwarz, himself one of the great trumpeters of his generation, before turning to conducting.

Many of the works on this recording were written for award-winning Duo Ahlert & Schwab, who have contributed greatly to making contemporary music from the United States a significant part of mandolin and guitar repertoire.

Gershwin began work on An American in Paris in the spring of 1928 and it's premi�re by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra under Walter Damrosch took place later that year on 13 th December in Carnegie Hall (three years earlier in the same venue Damrosch had conducted the first performance of Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F). In this hugely popular one-movement symphonic poem, whose colorful orchestration includes four saxophones and several taxi horns, the composer intended 'to portray the impressions of an American visitor in Paris as he strolls about the city, listens to the various street noises and absorbs the French atmosphere'. The melancholic blues theme announced by the solo trumpet, suggesting a sudden bout of homesickness on the part of the protagonist, is one of the finest Gershwin wrote. Following the premi�re in Boston's Symphony Hall of his Second Rhapsody, conducted by Serge Koussevitsky on 29 th January 1932, Gershwin and several friends took a two-week holiday in Havana. The composer, fascinated by the small Cuban dance orchestras with their novel rhythms and unusual percussion instruments such as guiros, maracas, claves and bongos, was inspired to write the Cuban Overture. He orchestrated the work between 1 st and 9 th August 1932, completing it just a week before the first All-Gershwin Concert at the Lewisohn Stadium in New York, an open-air concert attended by some 18,000 people which was, according to the composer, 'the most exciting night I have ever had'. Cast in Gershwin's characteristic fast-slow-fast form, he wrote that he had 'endeavored to combine the Cuban rhythms with my original thematic material. The result is a symphonic overture which embodies the essence of Cuban dance'. Gershwin's magnum opus, the three-act opera Porgy and Bess, was written to a libretto by DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin. Based on Heyward's novel Porgy about life among the black inhabitants of Catfish Row in Charleston, South Carolina, the opera was started in late February 1934 and the seven hundred page full score was completed in September 1935. Heyward memorably described the idiosyncratic working methods of the Gershwin brothers, who 'would get at the piano, pound, wrangle, swear, burst into weird snatches of song, and eventually emerge with a polished lyric'. It numbers amongst it's classic songs 'Summertime', 'I Loves You, Porgy' and 'It Ain't Necessarily So'. The orchestral suite heard on this recording, the Symphonic Picture from Porgy and Bess arranged by Robert Russell Bennett, has become the standard version since it's premi�re in 1943, this despite the fact that Gershwin made his own arrangement in 1936. Evidently long forgotten about by the time Bennett made his arrangement, Gershwin's suite was retitled Catfish Row by Ira when it was rediscovered in 1958. The opera, a commercial and critical failure at the time, is now recognized as one of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century American music.

This anthology brings together representative works from the mainstream of contemporary American choral music. Charles Ives's Psalm 90 evokes a mood reminiscent of congregational Sunday singing in New England.

American choral music has many faces and, while aware of tradition, often looks resolutely towards the future.