The Great American Piano Sonata

[autoharp]

suppose you were a US concert pianist, and you wanted to specialise in American piano music, what would you play?

Here's one such person - and mighty good she is too!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Oppens

Off at a tangent, this has revealed that she has recorded the Artur Schnabel violin sonata with Paul Zukofsky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_alhwz3MC2k&index=4&list=PLGoAh-uCHSIO50RRcAO5j5Azy46v4s_2s
Schnabel's a pretty interesting composer, by the way.

[ahinton]

suppose you were a US concert pianist, and you wanted to specialise in American piano music, what would you play?

Here's one such person - and mighty good she is too!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Oppens

Off at a tangent, this has revealed that she has recorded the Artur Schnabel violin sonata with Paul Zukofsky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_alhwz3MC2k&index=4&list=PLGoAh-uCHSIO50RRcAO5j5Azy46v4s_2s
Schnabel's a pretty interesting composer, by the way.

Yes, indeed he is. I have quite a few recordings of his works here. A far better composer than he was a pianist which, of course, is what he was and largely still is known as.

[chill319]

Thank you, all, for your entertaining responses to my earlier post! Humor aside, I think that Gauk's original thread-defining post touched a deep fault line in U.S. culture. Geniuses like Whitman and Ives surely explored  paths of aesthetic experience not previously known, even by giants like Goethe and Wagner. And they were indisputably American in mien as well as birth. The 'problem' is that they lived in a particular cultural moment, one that has long since gone underground. Gifted and challenging originals from just slightly later cultural moments such as, say, Chandler Brossard and Harry Partch are essentially irrelevant in today's art world, far more so than the academic crowd, so often functioning as courtiers of academia, far more so even than the appealing early outlier Anthony David Heinrich. No music can be great until heard on its own terms.