This is the sixth release in EMI's American Classics series, a series devoted to releasing the Company's extensive catalogue of American music of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The music on this release is devoted to the music of five lesser-known figures in American music. There was little original American music written before 1850 and what there was was very much out of the European tradition, so the five men featured on this disc can be regarded as pioneers in their field.

Dudley Buck and John Knowles Paine were both born in 1839 and were the first American-born composers to leave behind them a significant group of works. Buck's Festival Overture on The Star-Spangled Banner was his best-known work. Paine left a more substantial body of work and, today, is the better-known and more highly regarded of the two. Arthur Foote (born 1853) was a member of a group of American composers known as the 'Boston Six' (George Whitefield Chadwick, Amy Beach, Edward MacDowell, John Knowles Paine and Horatio Parker being the other five). Foote's music is reasonably well-represented in today's catalogue of recorded music, as is that of John Alden Carpenter (born 1876). Edward MacDowell (born 1866) is by far the most famous of the composers on this disc and he has attained a degree of greatness with his Second Piano Concerto, his many songs and his works for solo piano (who isn't familiar with To a wild rose from the Woodland Sketches.