John Adams, Harmonielehre, and American Music

So what about Harmonielehre is specifically American? It started with the New England 6, a group of composers who brought over the western styles to the united states during the turn of the 19th century. The way that American musicians, composers, and songwriters learned things, was borrowing from their home cultures, and fusing them together from the styles of the romantic period. They would sort of.... Quote each other in their music. That is stylistically the premise of the romantic era, the British, Russians, French, did this as well, except all in their own styles, composers such as ravel would travel around the world and experience influence from oriental cultures and begin to implement pentatonic scale into their own new genre of impressionism.

Back in the states, however, the crossroads of creative inspiration came from taking what had already been, and turning it completely on its head. One such composer to do this, was Charles ives. An insurance company owner, and music theorist during the turn of the 19th century, Ives was obsessed with taking every single rule on music theory and breaking it, doing the exact opposite of everything that people did when writing a piece of music. He did not know it at the time, but Ives had started a trend in western culture, specifically Americana culture.

It was already something that a lot of art movements were starting to figure out and begin to do around this time, completely break all the rules. By doing this, a new music was born! Experimental music. Music specifically designed as a test to bend or break a specific concept of music theory in order to create or understand a new principle of music. American theorists and composers were really the first to go full autism on this, going so far as to question the very nature of what even is music, by the 1920s, you had composers such as Mildred Couper attempting to invent new tonalities.

So what does any of this have to do with "American culture"? Well, during the early part of the country's existence, all of the major artistic and cultural productions, were widely and most obviously from European influence. The way Europe created art directly influenced the way we created art, films and so on the American music had to be invented and using the vast amount of theoretical experimentation, borrowing of ideas and incorporating it into a new style, such a music was created

It was everything all at once, from George Antheil to John Cage with this new type of music came one idea, that what is believed to be impossible can be achieved. Adams has spoken about this before, that American music encompasses the American dream. It is achieving the unachievable, taking something out of thin air, that has never existed before, and patenting it as a unique style and since the age of Charles Ives, many American composers strived to completely invent their own authentic style of composition from the ground up

Normal, everyday people like you and me have very little technical knowledge or experience when it comes to music. A piano, and a blank sheet of score paper could do most literally anything. All other schools of music did not think this way. When I did music theory in high school, I learned about this. They sat you down, taught you all of the rules, and then let you roam free and influence these rules with your own ideas, in Europe, China, Japan, the Middle East, Russia, and South America, this was not the case. 

I did a lot of research on South American and British contemporary music and they always borrow from their own traditional influences first. The French kind of did it at first, in the early 19th century but they quickly became too comfortable with a style that they created, rather than the idea of how it was created. The creative process has stuck with American contemporary composers since the days of Charles Ives, a random insurance agent living in New York City who just happened to invent one of the most important musical breakthroughs in human history. Just like how the Wright brothers were two middle class Americans living in Ohio who completely invented an entirely new form of transportation

Now back to Adams. He took all of his most brilliant ideas not from Stravinsky, or Arnold Bax, or any of the well known composers of our era. Yes he did learn and understand the theory, but his most influential and brilliant works actually came from him doing things like listening to random street performers in downtown Manhattan

Therefore I guess if I had to give a tl;dr. American music, is music that can be created by anyone  with enough time and enough patience