While in the early years of New England there was developing a music which, in a way, sprang from the people--a music which really expressed a vital phase of the common life--there were elsewhere springing up the first growths of a more sophisticated art. This art, borrowed from European culture, has served as the real foundation of all that is esoteric in American music to-day, but at the same time its presence has fostered those influences which constitute the barrier to a vital national expression. It is significant that these first appearances of a more ambitious art were in a department where there could be no nourishment from native roots of tradition, taste, or even understanding--that of opera. In spite of these circumstances, so discouraging to the healthy growth of a natural art-expression, it must be related that the operas of William H. Fry (born in Philadelphia, 1813; died 1864) were serious in their aim and in their workmanship showed the hand of a surprisingly skilled artist and one well versed in the older dramatic formulas. The claim that Fry has to the title given him by certain writers as 'the first American composer' is therefore considerable. Fry's training was entirely European. He was for some time resident in Paris, where, we are told, he was a friend of Berlioz. Of Fry's several operas 'Leonora' (produced in 1845) seems to have been the most successful. The book is after Victor Hugo's _Notre Dame de Paris_, and, while the score represents merely (as do many more modern American operatic scores) a strange mingling echo of the several European models of the day, there are a vitality and a grasp of form which make the achievement in a measure phenomenal. Associated with Fry in his musical life was another pioneer of the opera field, George F. Bristow (born in 1825; died in 1898), whose scores, however, have less of dramatic freedom than have those of Fry, being more strongly marked with the influences of German classicism. Bristow's works include an opera, 'Rip Van Winkle,' an unfinished opera, 'Columbus,' the oratorios 'Praise to God' and 'Daniel,' five symphonies, two overtures, string quartets, and many shorter works. Another name that finds place in the early annals of American music is that of Stephen Emery (born 1841; died 1891), counted a composer in his day but now known to us chiefly as one of America's first theoreticians and the teacher of many whose names are now well known. Larger is the place filled by the name of Gottschalk. Louis Moreau Gottschalk may be claimed as an American, having been born at New Orleans in 1829, but his decidedly Creole origin and French education seem to remove him from the line of relationship with those Anglo-Saxon traditions which we are apt to consider as constituting the purely American.