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.

This catalogue of the music of Charles Ives contains 728 entries covering all of the prolific composer's works. James Sinclair's book presents information produced by recent Ives scholarship and generous commentary on each of Ives's compositions. It completes the work begun by musicologist John Kirkpatrick in 1955, when Ives's music manuscripts were deposited in the Yale Music Library. Ives's works are arranged alphabetically by title within genres. Whenever possible, each entry includes the main title and any other titles the composer may have used; the forces required; the duration; headings of movements; publication history; citation of the first known performance and first recording; the derivation of the work, listing music on which it may be modeled or from which it may borrow material; the principal literature treating the piece; and commentary on these and other matters. The catalogue also provides musical incipits for all Ives's extant works, seven appendixes (covering his work lists, 'Quality Photo' lists, his songbooks, a chronology of his life, recordings made by Ives, and his private publications and commercial publishers), three concordances, and four extensive indexes (addresses, names, titles, and musical borrowings).

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.

Central to the evolution of American music is the legacy of Charles Ives. This grand-scale reference work provides details surrounding the multifarious responses to the achievement of this singular businessman/musician for more than a century. Performances, recordings, journalistic reports, reviews, and scholarly studies of all kinds as well as assorted Ivesiana in the form of literature, art, film, dance, and other expressions of homage are included. Many of the entries are amplified with contextual information or carefully selected excerpts. Professor Burk has been an enthusiastic connoisseur of Ives's music and a thoughtful student of the Ives literature for many years; his systematic presentation results in much more than a glorified work list or another ambitious bibliography.

This research guide provides detailed information on over one thousand publications and websites concerning the American composer Charles Ives. With informative annotations and nearly two hundred new entries, this greatly expanded, updated, and revised guide offers a key survey of the field for interested readers and experienced researchers alike.

Mad Music is the story of Charles Edward Ives (1874Ð1954), the innovative American composer who achieved international recognition, but only after he'd stopped making music. While many of his best works received little attention in his lifetime, Ives is now appreciated as perhaps the most important American composer of the twentieth century and father of the diverse lines of Aaron Copland and John Cage. Ives was also a famously wealthy crank who made millions in the insurance business and tried hard to establish a reputation as a crusty New Englander. To Stephen Budiansky, Ives's life story is a personification of America emerging as a world power: confident and successful, yet unsure of the role of art and culture in a modernizing nation. Though Ives steadfastly remained an outsider in many ways, his life and times inform us of subjects beyond music, including the mystic movement, progressive anticapitalism, and the initial hesitancy of turn-of-the-century-America modernist intellectuals. Deeply researched and elegantly written, this accessible biography tells a uniquely American story of a hidden genius, disparaged as a dilettante, who would shape the history of music in a profound way. Making use of newly published lettersÑand previously undiscovered archival sources bearing on the longstanding mystery of Ives's health and creative declineÑthis absorbing volume provides a definitive look at the life and times of a true American original.

With this innovative analysis of the music of Charles Ives, Philip Lambert fills a significant gap in the literature on one of America's most important composers. Lambert offers the first large-scale theoretical study of Ives's repertoire, encompassing major works in all genres. He argues that systematic techniques governed Ives's compositional language and thinking about music, even in his unconventional and apparently unstructured pieces. He portrays Ives as a composer of great diversity and complexity who nevertheless held to a single artistic vision. Using modes of analysis for post-tonal music and approaches devised specifically for the study of Ives as well, the author explains the origin, evolution, and culmination of Ives's systematic methods. He discusses important aspects of the composer's early training, the relation between Ives's experimental and his concert music, Ives's fugal and canonic techniques as the basis for his systematic music, his paradigms of procedure and transformation, and pitch relations in Ives's music, particularly the unfinished Universe Symphony. Lambert refutes the popular image of Ives as a highly eccentric composer haphazardly casting about for arbitrarily regulated ways of generating musical material and instead portrays him as a keenly determined and resourceful artist who gradually discovered ever more powerful tools for creating remarkably original 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.

Central to the repertoire of Western art music since the 1700s, the symphony has come to be regarded as one of the ultimate compositional challenges. In his series The Symphonic Repertoire, the late A. Peter Brown explored the symphony in Europe from its origins into the 20th century. In Volume V, Brown's former students and colleagues continue his vision by turning to the symphony in the Western Hemisphere. It examines the work of numerous symphonists active from the early 1800s to the present day and the unique challenges they faced in contributing to the European symphonic tradition. The research adds to an unmatched compendium of knowledge for the student, teacher, performer, and sophisticated amateur. This much-anticipated fifth volume of The Symphonic Repertoire: The Symphony in the Americas offers a user-friendly, comprehensive history of the symphony genre in the United States and Latin America.