The history of the American concerto might have started with Alexander Reinagle (1756–1809) and his Concerto on the Improved Pianoforte with the Additional Keys (1794), but this work by the English-born disciple of C. P. E. Bach is presumed lost. Judging by Reinagle's four piano sonatas, it must have been a major example of American instrumental music in the eighteenth century. A work from the mid-nineteenth century, which could have occupied a similar position there, is also missing: the Piano Concerto in F minor (1856) by Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–69). If the New Orleans-born, French-speaking, travelling virtuoso's concerto showed the skill of his best solo works in integrating Creole syncopations with European forms we might have had a precursor of Gershwin’s. As it is, the last decade of the nineteenth century saw the first American concertos to achieve wide currency. Their language reflects the European romanticism of Liszt, Grieg, Wagner and Brahms, much as later generations of American composers would respond to the main stream of modernism through Stravinsky, Bartók, Hindemith and the Second Viennese School.

Edward MacDowell (1860–1908) was regarded for almost half a century as the first major American composer. Afterwards that position was conceded to Ives. MacDowell went to Europe to learn all the conventional skills that Ives stayed at home to do without. At the age of fifteen MacDowell was taken to Paris, where he gained a scholarship at the Conservatoire as a pianist. He was composing all the time but he was fluent in the other arts too. He was offered free tuition as a painter there, and later on wrote poems and memoirs showing the literary bent to be found in other romantics like Schumann, Berlioz and Wagner. MacDowell failed to settle in Paris, unlike so many later American writers and composers – but found what he wanted at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt where be studied composition with Joachim Raff. In 1882 MacDowell played his Piano Concerto no. 1 to Liszt, who accepted the dedication. The key of A minor seems to be an immediate nod to Grieg’s famous example, but the whole work is polished and satisfying in layout. The two concertos deserve their popularity, but it is the second one (1889) that is the more characteristic.