Charles Ives' greatest music teacher was his father. His father was Danbury's musical leader, teaching any musical instrument needed. He was the Civil War band leader and carried out experiments in sound (for example, sounds made when three or four bands played together in different keys). His son, Charles Edward, tried to do those sounds in multiple keys, no one could play the music. It was terribly hard. Those who tried it, gave up. They called him a "crackpot," or an untrained musician and made fun of him. At Yale, he was told to follow the rules. His instructor disapproved of his music, so Ives performed one way in school and followed his own muse at home. When he finished at Yale, he had decided that he could not make a living with his music. He got a job at an insurance company for five dollars a week. Soon, he and a friend went into partnership and made a good living in the insurance business. He kept writing at night and storing it in his barn. Ives' dual life as a composer and business man led to a physical breakdown in 1918, which left him with permanent cardiac damage. During his long convalescence, he went through his music and had it published and sent to anyone he thought might be interested. It was not to be copyrighted and anyone who wanted a copy was to have one. Slowly, a few people learned to play parts of it. In 1939, John Kirkpatrick learned and played the Concord Sonata. People liked it and he repeated it. Ives' music began to be heard and liked so much so that by the time of his death in 1954, he had become an almost legendary figure. Ives way of musical notation resulted in his being called the first American to write 20th Century music.

In 1921, insurance executive Charles Ives sent out copies of a piano sonata to two hundred strangers. Laden with dissonant chords, complex rhythm, and a seemingly chaotic structure, the so-called Concord Sonata confounded the recipients, as did the accompanying book, Essays before a Sonata . Kyle Gann merges exhaustive research with his own experience as a composer to reveal the Concord Sonata and the essays in full. Diffracting the twinned works into their essential aspects, Gann lays out the historical context that produced Ives's masterpiece and illuminates the arguments Ives himself explored in the Essays . Gann also provides a movement-by-movement analysis of the work's harmonic structure and compositional technique; connects the sonata to Ives works that share parts of its material; and compares the 1921 version of the Concord with its 1947 revision to reveal important aspects of Ives's creative process. A tour de force of critical, theoretical, and historical thought, Charles Ives's Concord provides nothing less than the first comprehensive consideration of a work at the heart of twentieth century American music.

This new volume incorporates all entries from the previous editions by Arthur Wenk, expanding to cover writings drawn from periodicals, theses, dissertations, books, and Festschriften from 1940 to 2000. Over 9,000 references to analyses of works by over 1,000 composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are included.

In the last decade of the 19th century, modernist sensibilities reached a critical mass and emerged more frequently in music as composers began employing dissonance, polyrhythm, atonality, and densities. Conversely, many 20th-century composers eschewed modernist devices and wrote accessible works in a tonal idiom, which drew chiefly on classical, romantic, and folk models. Then the postmodern sensibility followed, with its enthusiasm for the unprecedented availability of virtually every type of music, and it engendered numerous sub-groups, including multiculturalism, minimalism, multimedia, and free improvisation. Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music focuses on modernist and postmodern classical music worldwide from 1890 to the present. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, an extensive bibliography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries, with more than 60 entries explaining the methods, styles, and acoustic and electronic media peculiar to new music, and over 350 entries giving essential information on the lives and work of the people who have composed and performed that music. Those entries also include pop, jazz, and rock composer/musicians whose work either overlaps the realm of classical music or else is so radical within its own field that it merits discussion in this context. This book is a must for anyone, musician or non-musician, student or professional, who seeks to research and learn more about any significant aspect of modern and contemporary classical music worldwide.

Baseball and the Music of Charles Ivesoffers readers an exceptionally rich understanding of Charles Ives. Through intelligent discussion of Ives's musical compositions combined with solid research on the composer's lifelong love of the American pastime, Ives's pioneering spirit and unique creativity are highlighted most clearly in this fascinating work.

This volume shows Charles Ives in the context of his world in a number of revealing ways. Five new essays examine Ives's relationships to European music and to American music, politics, business, and landscape. J. Peter Burkholder shows Ives as a composer well versed in four distinctive musical traditions who blended them in his mature music. Leon Botstein explores the paradox of how, in the works of Ives and Mahler, musical modernism emerges from profoundly antimodern sensibilities. David Michael Hertz reveals unsuspected parallels between one of Ives's most famous pieces, the Concord Piano Sonata, and the piano sonatas of Liszt and Scriabin. Michael Broyles sheds new light on Ives's political orientation and on his career in the insurance business, and Mark Tucker shows the importance for Ives of his vacations in the Adirondacks and the representation of that landscape in his music. The remainder of the book presents documents that illuminate Ives's personal life. A selection of some sixty letters to and from Ives and his family, edited and annotated by Tom C. Owens, is the first substantial collection of Ives correspondence to be published. Two sections of reviews and longer profiles published during his lifetime highlight the important stages in the reception of Ives's music, from his early works through the premieres of his most important compositions to his elevation as an almost mythic figure with a reputation among some critics as America's greatest composer.

American composer Charles Ives (1874–1954) has gone from being a virtual unknown to become one of the most respected and lauded composers in American music. In this sweeping survey of intellectual and musical history, David C. Paul tells the new story of how Ives's music was shaped by shifting conceptions of American identity within and outside of musical culture, charting the changes in the reception of Ives across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Paul focuses on the critics, composers, performers, and scholars whose contributions were most influential in shaping the critical discourse on Ives, many of them marquee names of American musical culture themselves, including Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, and Leonard Bernstein. Paul explores both how Ives positioned his music amid changing philosophical and aesthetic currents and how others interpreted his contributions to American music. Although Ives's initial efforts to find a public in the early twenties attracted a few devotees, the resurgence of interest in the American literary past during the thirties made a concert staple of his "Concord" Sonata, a work dedicated to nineteenth-century transcendentalist writers. Paul shows how Ives was subsequently deployed as an icon of American freedom during the early Cold War period and how he came to be instigated at the head of a line of "American maverick" composers. Paul also examines why a recent cadre of scholars has beset the composer with Gilded Age social anxieties. By embedding Ives' reception within the changing developments of a wide range of fields including intellectual history, American studies, literature, musicology, and American politics and society in general, Charles Ives in the Mirror: American Histories of an Iconic Composer greatly advances our understanding of Ives and his influence on nearly a century of American culture.

Charles Ives' massive Concord Sonata, his second sonata for piano, named after the town of Concord in Massachusetts, is central to his output and clearly reflects his aesthetic perspective. Geoffrey Block's wide-ranging account of the work thus provides an ideal introduction to this fascinating composer. This handbook discusses the Sonata's reception history and its compositional genesis, as well as providing a detailed account of the work's thematic content, its use of borrowed material, and the degree to which the program is influenced by the Concord Transcendentalists.