American composer George Rochberg made one of the most dramatic stylistic shifts of any composer when, late in the 1960s, he abandoned the twelve-tone system (in which he had written several highly praised works) in favor of tonality and Romanticism. Since then, his music has been free to adopt various styles, and even to quote older music.

This suite stems from Rochberg's friendship with guitarist Eliot Fisk, who has premiered a number of Rochberg compositions. He attended one of Fisk's concerts where he heard a set of guitar music by the great Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. Rochberg was impressed by the big sound Villa-Lobos' complex writing created for the usually intimate instrument, and decided to write a similar work.

One of the main characteristics of Villa-Lobos' guitar music is it effortless absorption of Brazilian musical elements, including urban and rural folk music and popular music credited to individual composers. Rochberg decided to write a North American set with similar qualities. Rochberg always had a love for American popular song standards. He started playing them in small jazz groups when he was a boy and got jobs arranging for Big Bands during the Swing era, which is how he saved money for college, with enough to provide college financial assistance for the girl he eventually married, to say nothing of supporting them both and their son later.

He chose five standards for this set: Rodgers' My Heart Stood Still, Warren's I Only Have Eyes for You, Carmichael's Two Sleepy People, Gershwin's Liza, and De Rose's Deep Purple. He added to them two of his own songs, How to Explain and Notre Dame Blues. The first of these two songs was a setting of a text by the composer's son, Paul Rochberg, who had died tragically just before; it was George's finding that he could not express the resulting feelings in the twelve-tone technique that caused him to reject it as an all-pervasive system.

The settings are highly complex in terms of the writing for the instrument, again taking their cue from the example of Villa-Lobos, whose Etudes and Preludes are the standard test for classical guitar-playing ability. Rochberg permitted Fisk to make some technical adjustments in the disposition of notes, but approved all his touches to the published edition.

Rochberg makes it clear that he considers the seven settings to be compositions rather than "arrangements" of the music of others. Although the original tunes are imbedded as "the essential melodic thread," he explains, he composed introductions and transition passages, expanded on harmonies and developed new motives inherent in the originals, and took the songs in various directions. In so doing, he made the original songs his through composition in the same manner that a great jazz soloist makes a standard his in an inspired improvisation.

Since the original material is American popular song, there is sometimes the feeling of a modern jazz performance in the music, particularly when played with the required rhythmic looseness. ("I don't want you to count!" Rochberg once exclaimed to Fisk when the latter was practicing one of the songs. "You've got to get inside these pieces! You've got to make them your own.") Fisk, for his part, is reminded sometimes of the sound of certain jazz performers when he studies the songs; in particular, he finds reminiscences of Miles Davis in the bitter sadness with which Rochberg treats How to Explain.

American Bouquet is one of the major sets of American solo guitar music.

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