Charles Ives Reconsidered (review)

Gayle Sherwood Magee is an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and author of Charles Ives: A Guide to Research (2002), a comprehensively annotated guide to the most significant literature on Ives (it includes English and foreign-language books, monographs, articles, chapters, dissertations and masters theses). Her most recent book, Charles Ives Reconsidered, is a valuable edition to the existing literature and offers a timely reconsideration of Ives and his music.

Magee's book contains detailed references to resources and scholarly research; however, the writing style of Charles Ives Reconsidered aspires to communicate as much to the music theorist as it does to the musician and to the non-specialist reader with a passing interest in Ives or 20th-century music. One of the great assets of the book, aside from Magee's music-specialist knowledge, is her ambitious approach to drawing out a wide interdisciplinary network and context to Ives's life and work. Very much in the style of New Historicist practice, she succeeds in presenting these complex layers of influences and connections with great clarity and transparency, particularly in her sophisticated use of historical resources and related materials.

Magee gives detailed descriptions of the circumstances that influenced and impacted Ives's compositional work and style. These include the changing cultural political environment, the contemporary public debate about American musical identity in relation to the role of his father, and Ives's own status as a nationally established model of the U.S. organist-composer. Magee also addresses the performances of international musical traditions (in particular the German-European tradition) at the Columbian exposition 1892 in Chicago, the background of Professor Horatio Parker and the musical curriculum offered by him at Yale, along with non-musical issues such as the insurance industry and Ives's neurasthenia, heart palpitations and tachycardia, first diagnosed and treated in late 1906, which culminated in his breakdown in October 1918. Other topics that she covers concern his professional relations, such as his attempts to engage others in his music, his two parallel careers (business and music), the political attitude in the U.S. during the First World War and his connections to musicians and peers such as E. Robert Schmitz, Henry Cowell, Elliott Carter and John Kirkpatrick.

The scope of this new biography is necessary for one of the main intentions of the book, which is to revisit the personal legends that have accompanied Ives's work over years. Even before his death Ives had already been credited with diverse myths, which, as in all narratives, are only partially based on facts—many of them, it turns out, are based on spurious or restricted evidence, or simply exaggerations that ignore the place of his oeuvre within the historical context. Magee reexamines many of these assumptions and persistent ideas by taking a close look at archival evidence such as published texts and scores, documented performances, eyewitness testimony, extracts from correspondence, published reviews and historical and contemporary critical assessments. She situates Ives's musical output and his personal relationships with his father; his wife, Harmony Twichell; his teachers (in particular Horatio Parker) and his peers in a much broader context within the cultural, economical, political, social and musical environment during Ives's life than commonly considered. In this way Magee offers a new perspective based on extensive historical research, including a revised chronology of his oeuvre.

One particular difficulty that Magee confronts concerns the compositional development of Ives's work, given that he revised his works later in his life. His marginalia are scattered all over his manuscripts and go back to diverse periods in his life such that later ideas have been incorporated into works that were dated much earlier. Based on extensive paper-type and handwriting analysis, Magee suggests new dates and periodization for the manuscript sources of Ives's compositions, which she draws from, among other sources, her earlier collaboration on Ives's work with J. Peter Burkholder and James...