Charles Ives and His World

Front Cover
James Peter Burkholder
Princeton University Press, 1996 M08 25 - 452 pages

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.

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Contents

Ives and the Four Musical Traditions
3
Ives Mahler and the Origins of Modernism
35
Ivess Concord Sonata and the Texture of Music
75
Charles Ives and the American Democratic Tradition
118
Ives in the Adirondacks
161
LETTERS
197
Selected Correspondence 18811954
199
REVIEWS
271
The Man and His Music Excerpt
373
An American Innovator Charles Ives
377
His Vision and Challenge
390
Four Symphonies by Charles Ives
394
Emergence of Charles Ives as Strongly Individual Figure In American Music
403
On Horseback to Heaven
408
Posterity Catches Up with Charles Ives
423
Charles IvesAmericas Musical Prophet Excerpt
430

Selected Reviews 18881951
273
CONTEMPORARY VIEWS OF IVES AND HIS MUSIC PROFILES 19321955
361
Charles E Ives
363
Charles E Ives
368
18741954
433
Index
443
List of Contributors
451
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