By Douglas Yeo (May 11, 2017; revised June 30, 2026)

On May 11, 2017, I posted an article on TheLastTrombone with the title, What is “American Style” in music? I received a lot of feedback on the article when it was first posted and now, with the 205th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 upon us, I thought I would update the article. A lot has changed in my life since 2017 so a refresh of the article makes it a bit more up-to-date. Here goes. . .

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In early 2017, my friend, Ronald Barron, with whom I shared 22 years as a member of the trombone section of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, posed a question to me:

What is “American Style” in music?

Ron had been thinking about this himself and gave a presentation on the subject at the International Trombone Festival in Valencia, Spain, in 2015. Since then, I’ve continued to think about his question, and the answer that I gave to Ron at that time.

For several years, I was a voice of the radio program, Arizona Encore! that is broadcast locally in Phoenix on KBAQ (KBACH) 89.5 and can also be heard anywhere in the world on the KBAQ website at 7:00 pm on Tuesdays.

While writing a script for an Arizona Encore! show that included Antonin Dvořák’s “American” String Quartet, Op. 12 in F major, Op. 96, Ron’s question came to mind again. I pulled out the comments I wrote when he first posed the question and thought that this would be a good time to turn them into a short article to provoke thought and discussion. I think anyone who lives in the United States would answer this question in their own way. But here’s what I think.

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What is “American Style” in Music?

Douglas Yeo

The Native people who settled and lived in what we call the United States of America have virtually no voice in today’s broad American cultural conversation. This is highly regrettable, because any discussion of an American Style – whether in music, painting, literature or any of those disciplines that we call “the arts” – has been influenced by them. That influence extends to my own life as a researcher (more on that below). When we talk about American Style – and for the sake of this discussion, I am confining my comments to American Style in music – we ought to remember that their contributions were fundamental in shaping the great “melting pot” (to use the over-used word) of influences that came to shores to settle in the United States.

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The African American spiritual, “The Old Ship of Zion,” as published in Slave Songs of the United States, published in New York by A. Simpson & Co. in 1867.

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The Puritans (from Boston, England, by way of the Netherlands and Plymouth, England), Roman Catholics (from Spain and Portugal), and traders (from the Netherlands and France) who were among the first European explorers of America brought their religious influences to what we today call the mid-Atlantic and New England states. English Psalm tunes and Italian-influenced Spanish plainchant was heard mixed with the folk music of the motherlands and rhythms and chants of America’s Native people. In time, the new colonies in North, Central, and South America – places that pushed away the Native peoples of the land – occupied by England, Holland and Spain, and France – developed their own form of folk song born out of a newly found freedom of expression. America was a vast place even before its West was discovered anew by Europeans, and the rural, agrarian life brought with it a sense of space, and distance from forces that dictated “proper” style. This mélange of ethnic groups was broadened even more with the introduction of the horrific slave trade. Denominational and non-conformist/free church musical traditions from Europe were influenced by Native,  African, and West Indian rhythmical expressions, and rather than exploding into the musical equivalent of the destruction of the Tower of Babel, they coalesced around a word that I believe most defines the American musical style:

Optimism.

Whether the music of spirituals — born out of great hardship from musical traditions brought to the Americas from Africa —  the steel/slide guitar tradition of Hawai’i that was adopted by bluegrass and country musicians in the American South, folk music of Appalachia, shaped note music of the South, honky-tonk and saloon music of the West, cakewalk and ragtime of Louisiana, gospel songs of Black and White churches and “the sawdust trail,” or what became jazz, it all had one theme: despite its considerable challenges and many problems, America — what became the United States of America — was a good place to live (in spite of its challenges), it was good to be there (in spite of its challenges), and there was more good ahead (as we pushed through its challenges).

So, while the classical and popular music of young, immigrant America was influenced both by the people who had roamed the land for centuries and those who had just arrived, the American sense of optimism – of “can do,” of the foray into the great unknown, of the pioneer spirit, of a gold rush that could (but would not but to a few) make any person rich, of “Happy Days are Here Again,” of the race to the moon – imprinted this place with a musical expression that was positive and looking forward. Even a great composer like Antonin Dvořák, who came to New York from Bohemia in 1892 and wrote music that was infused with an intangible, bright and optimistic quality, realized that he could not have written his “New World” Symphony or “American” String Quartet, in his own words, “‘just so’ if I hadn’t seen America.”

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James Reese Europe leads the 369^th Infantry Harlem Hellfighters Band in France, 1918.

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Of course, by the end of the long nineteenth century – roughly the time from 1776 (the writing of the American Declaration of Independence and the far-reaching implications it brought to the colonial powers who had conquered the land) to 1918 (the end of the First World War, the “war to end all wars” which, of course, it was not), the optimism began to ebb. Post-war ebullience was tempered by the loss of more than of a generation of young men from England, France, and Germany, and many from the United States. The Native people who had once roamed the land had been rounded up and confined to reservations. The promise of true emancipation for the descendants of slaves — something about which a Civil War was fought — gave way to Jim Crow. The economic boom of the 1920s paved the way to the Great Depression of the 1930s. A second World War consumed western civilization for nearly another decade, and all of the good intentions of the League of Nations and United Nations could not tame the greedy and selfish appetites of forces that were political, national and religious, whether the Ku Klux Klan, communism, or radical religious and governmental facism. The optimism gave way to cynicism, to forms of rebellion. Even in music. The work of the second Viennese School – with its abandonment of 18th century tonal harmony that led music to more and more reflect the chaos and ugliness of the times – took root. American composers like Aaron Copland, who in the middle of the 20th century seemed very much to define the American Style’s sense of space and optimism, traveled the road of the European serialists for a time, not wanting to be out of step with the relentless rush of modernity, seeing if he could find a new voice that was both relevant and honest. Some succeeded better than others,  yet there always seemed to be a pull back to the center of the American thought ethos — Copland, for instance, ultimately abandoned his “modernist” style —a desire not to be wholly desperate but rather hopeful even in the midst of what Paul Hindemith called, “confusion, rush and noise” (The Posthorn).

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“The Moravian Easter at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania,” Harper’s Weekly, Vol. XXXII, No. 1632, March 31, 1888, pages 228-229.

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For the trombone, the staid harmonies of Moravian chorales – by which the trombone was introduced to American shores – gave way to ragtime and jazz. The world found Arthur Pryor’s eye-popping trombone virtuosity to be nothing short of stunning, and trombone solos were found more and more frequently on band programs around the country. As jazz found its legs and kept growing out of the clothes of its African, West Indian, and European roots, styles like be-bop brought the joyful exuberance of Frank Rosolino and J.J. Johnson, whose creative and enthusiastic music and music making belied the dark demons that ultimately led them to point a barrel of a gun at their heads. And pull the trigger. For every trombone concerto by someone like Christopher Rouse – dark, brooding, introspective, even hopeless – there were two or three by composers like Eric Ewazen, who forsook his long exploration down the tunnel of serialism only to come out wholly embracing 18th century tonality and a new Romanticism with a renewed sense of joie de vivre, with a relentlessly syncopated rhythmic drive, and expansive melodies that seemed to point one to the high peaks and majestic canyons of the great American outdoors.

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Sierra Estrella (Komatk Doag), Arizona. View from Gila Crossing, the birthplace of Russell Moore. Photo by Douglas Yeo.

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As an American who, at the writing of this revision in 2026, has lived for more than seven decades and played the trombone for more than six of them, I find myself more and more attracted to – Hindemith, again – “the lasting, calm, and meaningful.” Having grown up and worked in the great population centers of the East and Midwest – childhood in New York City, college in Chicago, more college in New York City, and orchestral careers in Baltimore and Boston – I returned to the West for several years. Having been born in California in the final days of my father’s service in the U.S. Army during the Korean Conflict – a still unresolved war that became emblematic of the conflicts of the second half of the 20^th century and beyond – I made the decision to retire from the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2012 and my wife and I moved to Arizona, where the natural beauty and sense of space affected my artistic temperament in significant ways. From my front porch where at night it was so dark I could see the Milky Way with my naked eye – in the foothills of the Estrella Mountains (that is their Spanish name; the Native Americans who were here long before them called them Komatk Doag), with silhouettes of saguaro cacti on the horizon in every direction – I very much felt like the 19^th century American explorers Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery. Like them, I no longer knew what to expect around every turn as I did while in my comfort zone in the East.

At that time, my artistic personality was deeply informed by influences overlooked, forgotten, abandoned, and tamped down in the mad rush to settle the continent – the voices of the Native peoples. Their pottery and basketry informed and still informs the artistic ethos of our home. I got involved in a major research project about Russell “Big Chief” Moore, a member of the Akimel O’odham tribe who in 1912 – the year Arizona became the 48^th state in the Union – was born just over the mountains from my home, and went on to be one of America’s great jazz trombonists. That turned interest into a long article for the International Trombone Association Journal in 2017, “Take It, Big Chief! An Appreciation of Russell Moore.”  A few years later, in 2024, I wrote another article about a Native American musician, John Kuhn (an Assiniboine born on a reservation in Montana) who played Sousaphone in the John Philip Sousa Band and many other ensembles. A bison skull, a reminder of what the clash of old and new societies nearly brought to extinction, overlooked our patio and now hangs in our living room in the Chicago area, where we moved in 2018 so we could live closer to our grandchildren. A rack of shed elk antlers on display in our home reminds me that contrary to the dominant thought that I found so easy to embrace growing up and living for so long in the fast-paced East, I am not the biggest and strongest thing around. Most of all, though, our sojourn in Arizona brought me to a place where quiet was easy to find, where I could, within minutes, be where I could not see another indication of modernity as far as my eyes could see. This is why we continue to return to the West every year on vacation. It nourishes me.

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“Tribute to “Big Chief” Russell Moore,” The Mississippi Rag, Vo. XI, No. 3. Photo by Kathy Gardner

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This, for me, is America: bold, beautiful, ever changing, positive, optimistic. These American values are ever before me, and remind me that even though these noble aspirations are not always to be found  easily – there is much work to do in this imperfect, fallen world – the challenges faced in desiring them cannot keep me from pursuing them relentlessly. I pray that someday, our society will truly embrace the aspiration of the Declaration of Independence, and true equality — the realization of the aspiration that all “are created equal” — will be the norm. It is these qualities, in a season of life where I no longer need to play any music I do not wish to play, that have led me to choose to put aside music that tries to reflect the confusion of our present age. I do not need music to do that; there is enough of that confusion before me — and before you, as well — when I open my front door and step outside. Instead, I listen to and play music that celebrates the ideal of what I wish our present age to be. I stand with James Reese Europe and his 369^th Infantry Harlem Hellfighters Band, Russell Moore and his Akimel O’odham people, with John Kuhn and his Assiniboine, with Aaron Copland and his vision of  Appalachian Spring, Eric Ewazen and his Pastorale, and even Dvořák, whose “American” string quartet, composed in Iowa, reflects his understanding that American Style had to reflect something of the history and greatness of the land, its people, their struggle, and their strength. And, in this discussion, I have hardly touched on popular music, a subject that needs its own treatment of how the American experiment influenced it, from ragtime to jazz to rock n’roll and so much more. There is so much music. So much music.

In this, I am an American musician who embraces what I believe is the greatest informer of American Style in music: Optimism.

© 2017, 2026 Douglas Yeo. All rights reserved.