The American Five is a collective name applied by some writers to the modernist American composers Charles Ives (1874–1954), John J. Becker (1886–1961), Wallingford Riegger (1885–1961), Henry Cowell (1897–1965), and Carl Ruggles (1876–1971).Chase, Gilbert. "American Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present." Music & Letters, Vol. 69, No. 4 (Oct., 1988), pp. 542-545.Antokoletz, Elliott (2014). A History of Twentieth-Century Music in a Theoretic-Analytical Context, p.166. Routledge. . "[Riegger and Becker] were grouped with Ives, Ruggles, and Cowell as the 'American Five'." They were noted for their modernist and often dissonant compositions which broke away from European compositional styles to create a distinctly American style.New York Public Library Guide to the John J. Becker Papers The name was coined in imitation of the group of Russian composers called The Five.USD Symphony Program Notes
The origin of the term "The American Five" is unclear. The five composers, although many of them were known to each other, did not work, or publicise themselves, as a group. According to Don C. Gillespie, "the first use of the phrase [an 'American Five'] seems to have been made by the composer John Downey in 1962, the year following Becker's death."Gillespie, Don C. (1977). John Becker: Midwestern Musical Crusader, p.iii. Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina. However, Stuart Feder credits Gillespie, saying that, "Gillespie has called them 'the American Five.'"Feder, Stuart (1992). Charles Ives, "my Father's Song": A Psychoanalytic Biography, p.346. Yale. . "During the early 1930s, the five composers most 'conspicuously concerned with innovation' were Ives, Ruggles, Cowell, Becker, and Wallingford Riegger." See also Feder's . Gilbert Chase says that Gillespie, "the leading authority on Becker," credits Becker as "'the first person to promulgate the theory of the "Ives group," or "The American Five," as it is often called today.'"Chase, Gilbert (1992). America's Music, from the Pilgrims to the Present, p.462. University of Illinois. . Stephen Budiansky credits Becker, saying that he, "began insisting that he was one of the 'American Five' great modern composers."Budiansky, Stephen (2014). Mad Music: Charles Ives, the Nostalgic Rebel, p.231. ForeEdge. . "Placing himself alongside Ives, Ruggles, Cowell, and Riegger." Peter Garland has written that Dennis Russell Davies organized "the 1980 Cabrillo Music Festival around my [i.e. Garland's] thesis-idea of 'The American Five'", and found a supporter in Lou Harrison.Garland, Peter; ed. (1987). A Lou Harrison Reader, p.94. Soundings. "(Ives-Ruggles-Riegger-Cowell-Becker)."
The music historian Richard Taruskin notes that a group of composers including Becker, Riegger and Ruggles, and also Dane Rudhyar and Ruth Crawford Seeger, became associated with Cowell during the period when he published the magazine The New Music Quarterly (1927–1936). The magazine was financed by Ives. Taruskin (who does not use the term 'American Five' in his survey) comments that "the members [of this group] shared both a technical orientation and an expressive purpose which, like Ives's own may be jointly summed up as transcendental maximalism."Richard Taruskin, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press (2010), , p. 295.
See also Atonality Complementation Dissonant counterpoint Polyrhythm Tone cluster
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