---
title: "250 Years In, Does American Classical Music Still Answer to Europe?"
description: "As the nation marks its 250th birthday, the concert hall remains a place where the old question of cultural independence is still alive — and Los Angeles may be closer to an answer than anywhere."
category: "Entertainment"
category_url: https://herald.la/category/entertainment
author: "Camila Reyes"
published: 2026-06-30T09:48:00.000Z
updated: 2026-06-30T09:48:00.000Z
canonical: https://herald.la/article/250-years-in-does-american-classical-music-still-answer-to-europe
tags: ["classical music", "American music", "LA Philharmonic", "culture", "America 250", "Walt Disney Concert Hall"]
---
# 250 Years In, Does American Classical Music Still Answer to Europe?

As the nation marks its 250th birthday, the concert hall remains a place where the old question of cultural independence is still alive — and Los Angeles may be closer to an answer than anywhere.

Every anniversary invites a reckoning. At 250, the American concert hall faces an old one.

## A durable provocation

In a July 2026 essay, ["American Classical Music Remains European,"](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/30/arts/music/american-classical-music-remains-european.html) The New York Times revives one of criticism's most persistent claims: that for all its homegrown genius, the American concert hall still instinctively bows toward Europe. It is an argument worth engaging as a provocation rather than a verdict — useful precisely because it overstates. The pattern it describes is real enough: for most of the twentieth century, orchestras from Boston to Los Angeles built their seasons on Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner, treating the European canon as a kind of gravitational center.

## A native tradition, often obscured

And yet American composition tells a story of restless invention. Charles Ives was layering New England hymn tunes against dissonance before World War I; Aaron Copland drew on folk song to build the wide-open sound Americans still call their own; George Gershwin threaded jazz through the concert hall with *Rhapsody in Blue*; Leonard Bernstein argued the same case from both Broadway and Carnegie Hall. And [Florence Price](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Price) became the first African American woman to have a symphony played by a major American orchestra when the Chicago Symphony premiered her *Symphony in E minor* in 1933 — weaving spirituals and Black dance rhythms through the symphonic frame. The rediscovery of a trove of her manuscripts in an abandoned Illinois house in 2009 forced an overdue reckoning with whose work the canon had left out.

## The California counterargument

If any institution argues against the "still-European" thesis, it is the [Los Angeles Philharmonic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Philharmonic). Under Esa-Pekka Salonen, who led the orchestra from 1992 to 2009, it became known for absorbing contemporary music with rare authority, and its new-music programming gave living composers a genuine home. Gustavo Dudamel extended that commitment after 2009; since Walt Disney Concert Hall opened in 2003, the orchestra has commissioned dozens of new works. John Adams — a Pulitzer winner and among the most-performed living American composers — has had a long relationship with the ensemble, and his music sounds like nothing produced in Vienna or Leipzig. The orchestra's coming leadership, with Salonen returning in a creative role and Daniel Harding taking the podium, doubles down on that identity.

## The better question

Perhaps the sharper issue is not whether American music is European, but whether the programming pipeline reflects the full range of what American composers have made. Florence Price waited decades for major performances; minimalists like Philip Glass and Steve Reich were embraced in lofts and European festivals before the big halls came around. The American tradition is not thin — it is wide, contentious, jazz-inflected and, in Los Angeles at least, genuinely adventurous. The question at 250 may be less about Europe than about nerve: whether concert halls are brave enough to program the tradition they already have.

## Sources

- [American Classical Music Remains European (essay)](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/30/arts/music/american-classical-music-remains-european.html)
- [Florence Price](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Price)
- [Los Angeles Philharmonic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Philharmonic)