About

Founded in 2009, American Century Music (ACM) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to performing the works of 20th-century American composers. ACM aims to bring greater exposure to this body of work and further cultural dialogue about the place of American composers and their work within the American Century and beyond.

ACM is uniquely designed to work with a wide array of musicians and institutions, presenting repertoire ranging from solo instrument to full orchestra. In its debut season, ACM performed over 20 twenty works by a dozen composers from “The American Century,” including Amy Beach, Charles Griffes, Walter Piston, Donald Martino, and Elliott Carter. ACM has given performances at the Boston Public Library and Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, and the 2011/12 season will see the inauguration of ACM’s first monthly concert series in Boston, collaborating with such ensembles and artists as the Lydian String Quartet, Claremont Trio, and violinist Curtis Macomber.

MISSION

Iconic American publisher Henry Luce coined the phrase “The American Century” in a 1941 Life magazine editorial intended to wake the nation from its isolationism and to summon it to a new role among the world’s leading nations.  Now in the second decade of the 21st century, we have the perspective to see that much of what Henry Luce and others advocated during the 20th Century about America’s international role in fact came to fruition.  Paraphrasing from Luce’s essay, by the close of the 20th Century Hollywood movies, American television, American slang, American machines and products were recognized in every community in the world.

What has never been examined in much depth, either at home or internationally, is America’s art music.  During the same period as the flourishing of American jazz, Hollywood, television and fast food, American composers writing music derived from European structural and theoretical models were composing major works for solo instruments, chamber ensemble, orchestra, chorus and opera, all of which would come to be recognized as containing an “American Voice.”

The amount of repertoire from these composers is enormous and seldom heard.  With over a hundred composers and multiple hundreds of compositions amongst them, ACM was created to fill a vacuum in America’s cultural fabric by bringing these inspired, well-crafted works out of their obscurity with committed, insightful performances which they unquestionably deserve.