38 American classical musicians

Ernest Joseph "Trey" Anastasio III born September 30, 1964) is an American guitarist, singer, songwriter, and composer best known as the lead vocalist of the rock band Phish, which he co-founded in 1983. He is credited by name as composer of 152 Phish original songs, 141 of them as a solo credit, in addition to 41 credits attributed to the band as a whole.

Leroy Anderson was an American composer of short, light concert pieces, of which many were introduced by the Boston Pops Orchestra under the direction of Arthur Fiedler. John Williams described him as "one of the great American masters of light orchestral music."

Robert Barto is an American lutenist specializing in the music of the Baroque and Empfindsamkeit periods, in particular the oeuvres of Sylvius Leopold Weiss and Bernhard Joachim Hagen.

Joan Benson was an American keyboard player who specialized in the clavichord and fortepiano.

Benjamin Walter Bowman is an American-Canadian violinist. The Metropolitan Opera and incoming Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin appointed Bowman as concertmaster as of the 2018-19 season, after a successful one-year term in 2017-18; he shares his role with David Chan. Bowman was Grammy-nominated in 2016 for his recording with the ARC Ensemble 'Chamber Works of Jerzy Fitelberg' on the Chandos label. He has performed to critical acclaim throughout North America, Europe and Asia. He is a member or frequent guest artist for leading chamber music ensembles internationally, including the twice Grammy-nominated ARC Ensemble, Art of Time Ensemble, and Leondari Ensemble. Bowman was featured on the 2013 Juno-winning album Levant and the 2011 Juno-nominated disc Armenian Chamber Music with the Amici Chamber Ensemble. Until 2019, he was the concertmaster of the American Ballet Theatre orchestra. He is an ensemble member of Orchestra of St. Luke's.

Ken Christianson is an American musician and artist living in Los Angeles, California, U.S, and co-founder of Père Music. He is the composer of the score to the short film Better Left Alone (2005), resident composer for the Samantha Giron Dance Project, bass player for the Los Angeles funk-jam band The Three Trees, violinist for The Jimmy Lifton Group, and former keyboard player for the indie rock band, Rogue Wave.

James Francis Cooke spent his life involved with music. He was a pianist, composer, playwright, journalist, author, a president of Theodore Presser music publishers from 1925 to 1936, and editor of The Etude music magazine from 1907 to 1950, or 1913 to 1956. He taught piano for more than twenty years in New York, led choral clubs and taught voice. He also gave music-topic lectures.

Chanda Dancy is an American film composer, violinist, keyboardist, and singer.

Carmen Dragon was an American conductor, composer, and arranger who in addition to live performances and recording, worked in radio, film, and television.played Sofia Lauren’s Conductor Father. Filmed at the actual Watergate on the side of the river, in “Houseboat” with Cary Grant 1958.

JoAnn Falletta is an American conductor.

Lillian Gordis, born on July 12, 1992, in Berkeley, California, is an American-born harpsichordist who moved to France when she was 16.

Sara B. Groenevelt was a litterateur and classical musician. Both her daughters became professional musicians as well.

William Kemper Harreld was an American concert violinist. He was also a pianist and organist.

Lincoln Holroyd was a cornet soloist with Arthur Pryor, Patrick Conway and appeared with the John Philip Sousa Band. He was an active performer, band leader and music educator in Utica, N.Y., from 1905 until his death in 1961.

Wesley Isaac Howard was a violinist and professor in charge of the violin and ensemble departments at the Howard University Conservatory of Music from 1921-1927.

Teiji Ito was a Japanese composer and performer. He is best known for his scores for the avant-garde films by Maya Deren.

Charles Edward Ives was an American modernist composer, one of the first American composers of international renown. His music was largely ignored during his early life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Later in life, the quality of his music was publicly recognized, and he came to be regarded as an "American original". He was also among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, with musical techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatory elements, and quarter tones. His experimentation foreshadowed many musical innovations that were later more widely adopted during the 20th century. Hence, he is often regarded as the leading American composer of art music of the 20th century.

David Jolley is a horn soloist and chamber musician.

Scott Joplin was an American composer and pianist. Joplin achieved fame for his ragtime compositions and was dubbed the King of Ragtime. During his brief career, he wrote over 100 original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas. One of his first and most popular pieces, the "Maple Leaf Rag", became ragtime's first and most influential hit, and has been recognized as the archetypal rag.

Linda Maxey is a celebrated concert marimbist virtuoso and was the first marimbist presented by Community Concerts, an division of Columbia Artists Management in New York that presented concerts to a network of subscription audiences whose pooled resources attracted leading performers and ensembles.

Henry Simon Mazer, was an American and later Taiwanese conductor, recording artist and music educator who was the founding principal conductor and music director of Taipei Philharmonic Orchestra from 1985 until suffering a stroke in February 2001. Prior to his move to Taiwan, he was the conductor and associate conductor of major American symphonies including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He contributed greatly to the refinement of the performances of classical music in Taiwan, leading local musicians to gain recognition overseas. There is a cultural center dedicated to him in Taipei.

Leon Milo is an American composer, percussionist and sound artist.

Stephen Rowley Montague is an American composer, pianist and conductor who grew up in Idaho, New Mexico, West Virginia and Florida.

James Neglia is a percussionist, an International Music Coordinator, Music Contractor, Orchestra Personnel Manager with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra 2004-2017 and the Jacksonville Symphony in Florida 2018 to the present, and author of three books, Onward and Upward. Center Stage and Visitors from the Past, published July 2020.

Walter Hamor Piston Jr,, was an American composer of classical music, music theorist, and professor of music at Harvard University.

Mary Ruth Ray (1956–2013) was an internationally known classical musician who received critical acclaim throughout the United States, Europe and Russia.

Count Andrey Kirillovich Razumovsky, was a Russian diplomat who spent many years of his life in Vienna. His name is transliterated differently in different English sources, including spellings Razumovsky, Rasumofsky, and Rasoumoffsky.

Harold Rosenbaum is an American conductor and musician. He is the artistic director and conductor of the New York Virtuoso Singers and the Canticum Novum Singers. The New York Virtuoso Singers appear on over 40 albums on labels including Naxos Records and Sony Classical. He has collaborated extensively with many ensembles including the New York Philharmonic, Juilliard Orchestra, American Symphony Orchestra, Bang on a Can, Mark Morris Dance Group, Orchestra of Saint Luke's, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Riverside Symphony, and Brooklyn Philharmonic.

Leo Gregorovich Sirota was a Jewish pianist born in Kamianets-Podilskyi, Podolskaya Guberniya, Russian Empire, now Ukraine.

Maurice Strakosch was an American musician and impresario of Czech origin.

Theodore Thomas was a German-American violinist, conductor, and orchestrator of German birth. He is considered the first renowned American orchestral conductor and was the founder and first music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (1891–1905).

Anton Torello was a Catalan double bass player. He was Principal Bass of the Philadelphia Orchestra from 1914 until 1948, and was the first bass professor at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music. He taught what became the Philadelphia school of double bass playing, strongly influencing American bass playing.

Roger Louis Voisin was an American classical trumpeter. In 1959, The New York Times called him "one of the best-known trumpeters in this country."

Elizabeth Wagele (1939–2017) was an American artist, musician, and writer of books on the Enneagram of Personality and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).

Kurt Julian Weill was a German composer, active from the 1920s in his native country, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. With Brecht, he developed productions such as his best-known work, The Threepenny Opera, which included the ballad "Mack the Knife". Weill held the ideal of writing music that served a socially useful purpose, Gebrauchsmusik. He also wrote several works for the concert hall. He became a United States citizen on August 27, 1943.

George Elbridge Whiting was an American composer of classical music.

Patrick Moody Williams was an American composer, arranger, and conductor who worked in many genres of music, and in film and television.

Frank Vincent Zappa was an American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, composer, film-maker, and bandleader. His work is characterized by nonconformity, free-form improvisation, sound experiments, musical virtuosity, and satire of American culture. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa composed rock, pop, jazz, jazz fusion, orchestral and musique concrète works, and produced almost all of the 60-plus albums that he released with his band the Mothers of Invention and as a solo artist. Zappa also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed album covers. He is considered one of the most innovative and stylistically diverse rock musicians of his era.