Edito Difficult to apply the term "classical" to American music, since American culture as Europeans know it is just 200 years old ... The first major writers, Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman, appear in the first half of the nineteenth century, composers Edward MacDowell, Charles Ives, in the second half of the nineteenth century. The immigrants came with their music, the mixture took shape at the beginning of the twentieth. A music festival dedicated to the music of the twentieth century had to celebrate this match ... We owe so much to America ... which owes so much to Europe. In short, American classical music, contemporary in essence, is a stakeholder in the modern and postmodern experimentation, both inspired by the composers of the Old World and itself a source of inspiration. Romance with Edward MacDowell, Modernism with Charles Ives, atonality with John Cage, repetitive music with Steve Reich ,Colin McPhee's eastern inspiration, everything has been treated by the Americans. And if we must retain a figure, whether one, so symbolic, Aaron Copland, born in 1900, a student of Nadia Boulanger in the 1920s, working on the so American principle of "Music for use "- a creation using both an artistic and a utilitarian purpose (film music, radio, theater) - and leaving notes in the forefront of sixties before disappearing in 1990. "America Is a tune. It Must Be sung together. ". Gerald Stanley Lee, "Crowds". Writer and American professor, 1862-1944.