In the 20th century, France and the United States made particularly noteworthy and interesting musical developments among other countries. Both of the two countries tried to forge a national cultural identity amidst political upheavals of the times and the two World Wars. I specified the time period as after 1920, because the interactions between French and American music dated from that time. French composers were influenced by American popular music, especially by jazz, and many American composers came to France to study from the 1920s. French composers, also, came to the United States as immigrants or visitors for political and professional reasons, which resulted in spreading their influences. The purposes of this project were to explore significant and representative clarinet repertoire written by French and American composers and to comprehend their distinctive compositional styles. I thus tried to incorporate diverse musical styles that appeared in France and the United States in presenting three recitals as satisfaction of the requirements for a Doctor of Musical Arts Degree at the University of Maryland, College Park. These recitals comprised works by such French composers as Camille Saint-Saens, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Olivier Messiaen, Eugene Bozza, Henri Tomasi, and Jean Fran9aix and by such American composers as George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Vincent Persichetti, Donald Martino, and Elliott Carter. Program notes were presented at each recital to describe the characteristic musical styles of the selected composers and their brief biographies. These recitals took places on December 9, 2006, April23, 2007, both in Ulrich Recital Hall, and on December 7, 2007, in the Gildenhorn Recital Hall of the Clarice Performing Arts Center in College Park.