Through their reminiscences, Ives's relatives, friends, colleagues, and associates reveal aspects of his life, character, and personality, as well as his musical activities.

Charles Ives grew up in the nineteenth century and composed chiefly in the twentieth. His nostalgia for a simpler life in the New England country town of his youth is revealed in his frequent musical quotation of songs of that earlier time: parlor and patriot songs, hymns and gospel music. He had learned these songs early in his life through his father, a village bandmaster, who remained the most important influence in his life and music. Ives absorbed these influences within an innovative and modern musical style of composition. Stuart Feder's account of Ives's life clarifies the complexities of the man and his music, while his straightforward discussion of this uniquely autobiographical music in turn illuminates the narrative.

Henderson provides important insights into the composer's body of work.

An engaging new portrait of the seminal American composer

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.

Although Charles Ives has long been viewed as the quintessential American composer, he placed himself in the European classical tradition, drew on it heavily for his aesthetic philosophy and musical techniques, and extended it to create something new. This book illuminates Ives's music by comparing it with that of other composers in Europe and the United States. Edited by two highly regarded Ives scholars, the book begins with essays that examine the influences on Ives of his musical predecessors and concludes with essays that find extensive parallels between Ives and such European contemporaries as Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, and Stravinsky, whose music he knew little or not at all, but with whom he shared influences and concerns. Taken together, these chapters demonstrate that even apparently strange or distinctively American aspects of Ives's music--from his penchant for quotation to his juxtaposition of disparate styles--have strong precedents and parallels among European composers. Ives emerges as a composer at home in the classical tradition, engaged in exploring the same issues that confronted composers of his generation on both sides of the Atlantic.

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.

Charles Ives is widely regarded as the first great American composer of classical music. But listening to his music is an adventure—hearing how a piece begins may not prepare you for what comes next, or how it ends. Knowing one Ives piece may not prepare you for another. Award-winning music historian J. Peter Burkholder provides an introduction to the composer’s diverse musical output and unusual career to readers of any background, discussing about forty of the best and most characteristic pieces framed with biographical sketches. Burkholder shows how Ives mastered each tradition he encountered, from American popular music to classical European genres, from Protestant church music to his own unique experimental idiom, and then interwove elements from all these traditions in the astonishing works of his maturity. Listening to Charles Ives contains compelling walkthroughs of select pieces and ultimately reveals that there is an Ives piece for everyone.

This is a compelling and inspiring look at spiritual beliefs that influenced some of the world's greatest composers, now revised and expanded with eight additional composers.

How one extraordinary pianist, scholar, and editor prepared for publication important scores by Ives, Copland, and Ruggles, and reshaped the history of American musical modernism. For over sixty years, the scholar and pianist John Kirkpatrick tirelessly promoted and championed the music of American composers. In this book, Drew Massey explores how Kirkpatrick's career as an editor of music shaped the musicand legacies of some of the great American modernists, including Aaron Copland, Ross Lee Finney, Roy Harris, Hunter Johnson, Charles Ives, Robert Palmer, and Carl Ruggles. Drawing on oral histories, interviews, and Kirkpatrick's own extensive archives, Massey carefully reconstructs Kirkpatrick's collaborations with such luminaries, displaying his editorial practice and inviting reconsideration of many of the most important debates in American modernism --for example, the self-fashioning of young composers during the 1940s, the cherished myth of Ruggles as a composer in communion with the "timeless," and Ives's status as a pioneer of modernist techniques. First winner (November 2014) of ASCAP's Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism. Drew Massey is an Assistant Professor of Music at Binghamton University.