What are reasons American composers might have turned to europeans for musical inspiration…?
As Alberich correctly states, Europe is the cradle of American music. The only ‘American’ composers who do not have their roots in Europe are any of those that might be North American Indian origin. America doesn’t really have any ‘western’ cultural history to speak of before the 17th century. What culture it has was imported with the settlers who came from Europe. It wasn’t until Charles Ives and Sousa started looking at quintessentally ‘American’ sounds in their works that music in the Americas broke away from the European models it had inherited from its forefathers. The ‘American sound’ you mention is a very recent thing – little more than 100 years old. Ives started it and Aaron Copland became famous for the ‘wide open space’ sound of his music (although it’s hard to pin-down WHY it sounds the way it does and why it should invoke America). Now, most American composers ‘sound’ American – which shows how much influence composers like Ives and Copland had on the future of music (like
