The most popular Romantic American composer was Edward MacDowell, who wrote many piano pieces and two piano concertos. It is music that will forever remain justly obscure, but, still, let the record show that the first American piano composer of note might be called, “The Thelonious Monk of the Classical Style.”

Antony Heinrich‘s idiosyncratic pre-Civil War piano music is startlingly rough-hewn and abstract, with blunt corners more extreme than Joseph Haydn or Ludwig Van Beethoven.