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.

Looks at how Ives' music changed over the course of his career, identifies the most important influences, and discusses the themes of Ives' work

Charlie listened all through his boyhood, and as he grew into a man, he found he wanted to re-create in music the sounds that he heard every day. But others couldn't hear what Charlie heard. They didn't hear it as music--only as noise. In this daring and

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

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.

When the Lusitania was attacked in 1915, the American composer and New Yorker Charles Ives transformed the experience of this heartbreaking news into a musical piece. It begins with a jumble of traffic noises, then the hurdy-gurdy swells into the lovely old hymn “In the Sweet Bye-and-Bye.” In lyrical text and watercolors—sometimes in dramatic wordless spreads—this thoughtful picture ebook reveals not only a wartime tragedy, but a composer’s conviction that everyday music can convey profound emotion—and help heal a city. Young readers will understand that if they listen, music can be heard in the unlikeliest of places, from the busy chatter of a market to the wail of a fire engine.

An engaging new portrait of the seminal American composer

Brusque, inventive, an eccentric loner who created some of the greatest music of our time while getting rich as a New York insurance broker, Charles Ives was an authentic American original. In this major biographical study, the author explores the unlikely drama of the composer's life, from his boyhood in a Connecticut village to his later years when, ignored or derided by the musical community, he shut himself up in angry silence. Then, with a high order of scholarship and crisply edged authority, the author goes on to point out the intelligence and continuity of Ives's major works - the songs, the Concord sonata, the magnificent New England Holidays (which include his famous Fourth of July), and the rest - and to trace their roots in nineteenth-century popular music, in jazz, in the homely transcendentalism of Thoreau and Hawthorne's dark Puritan dreams. Writing with a musician's understanding and sympathy, the author makes plain both the frustrations of Ives's creative life and the inevitability of his ultimate recognition, long after his death, as America's most important composer. In its rich musical insights, in its portrayal of a complex and fascinating artist, this book is a striking contribution to American cultural history.

Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

Charles Ives is famous for using borrowed material in his music. Almost two hundred individual works or movements, spanning his entire career and representing more than a third of his output, incorporate music by other composers or from his own previous work. In this book, the eminent Ives scholar J. Peter Burkholder identifies the different kinds of "quotations" in Ives's music, explores the complex musical, aesthetic, and psychological motivations behind the borrowings, and shows the purpose, techniques, and effects that characterize each one. Burkholder catalogues fourteen distinct ways that Ives borrowed, ranging from direct quotation to paraphrase, variation, collage, modeling, and stylistic allusion. Arguing that these borrowing procedures were compositional strategies, he provides a new perspective on Ives's process of composition. In addition, by tracing the development of Ives's borrowing practices through his career, he contributes to an understanding of the composer's stylistic evolution. And by showing how much of Ives's music uses borrowing procedures that are common to many composers, he reveals that Ives is not as far removed from the classic-romantic tradition as has been thought. Finally, Burkholder's comprehensive treatment of Ives's borrowing techniques offers a new perspective on the entire field of musical borrowing.