Samuel Barber

Although Samuel Barber is best known for his 1936 "Adagio for Strings" (which he wrote as the slow movement of a string quartet), he was also an important composer of works for piano. This paper examines one of his most lush works for piano, Piano Sonata Op. 20 ("Excursions"). This work, like his other compositions, was essentially neo-romantic in form, affect and idiom.

The work, more completely tonal in composition than some of his other piano works (which, like some of his work for strings, makes passing references to the twelve-tonal music that marked the work of many of his contemporaries writing in the first decade of the 20th century. This sonata, as is true of his other works, is both lyrical and neo-romantic - although not in any way nostalgic (which is rather surprising, given its overtly regional references) (Mellers 119).

The passion for Americana that swept into the hearts and minds of so many American composers in the year

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