John Kirkpatrick, American Music, and the Printed Page by Drew Massey (review)

John Kirkpatrick is primarily remembered as a pianist, and specifically for a single performance: his premiere of Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata at the Town Hall concert on 20 January 1939. In this book, Drew Massey attempts to provide a more complete picture of Kirkpatrick’s varied professional activities, with an emphasis on his role as an editor of early- and mid-century American music: “In this book I view Kirkpatrick’s editorial output primarily as a detailed and sustained commentary on the past and present state of American musical composition” (p. 2).

One of the first issues Massey addresses in regards to editorial methods is the distinction between “collaborative editing” (with living composers) and “retrospective editing” (the promotion of dead composers). “One reason Kirkpatrick makes a claim on our attention is that he forged collaborative and retrospective editorial methods into a new hybrid editorial practice in which his own understanding of history played a central role” (p. 3). In the introduction, Massey briefly teases out a few of the consequences of this new hybrid method that are later fleshed out in full detail. The main thrust here is that Kirkpatrick’s “understanding of history” changed throughout his career, and therefore his editorial practices changed accordingly. In a way, this methodological inconsistency is the story of this book, and in that context it is perfectly appropriate that Ives and Carl Ruggles are the two composers that feature most prominently in Kirkpatrick’s career. Near the end of the introduction, Massey identifies six overlapping themes in Kirkpatrick’s editorial career: his roles as collaborator and mentor to composers, representative of music publishing firms, leader in the Charles Ives Society, imagination as an editor, voice as an author, and the relationship between his performing career and editorial practice (p. 6). The chapter structure of the book follows these themes loosely, but with a healthy dose of intermingling throughout.

The first chapter, “Beginnings,” is an important biographical sketch of Kirkpatrick’s early life. Kirkpatrick’s path to professional success was not direct; he was disinterested and failed in his studies at Princeton, and eventually left for Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger and Isidore Philipp. At this point, Kirkpatrick made many of his lasting friendships and professional contacts with prominent American composers, such as Aaron Copland (one of his classmates with Boulanger), Roy Harris, and Virgil Thomson (pp. 15–17). Kirkpatrick wrote almost nothing about his studies with Boulanger, but his career as a copyist started at this point (including works by Thomson and Harris), perhaps as an outgrowth of Boulanger’s exacting notational demands (p. 17). Ironically, although Kirkpatrick’s family home was less than an hour from Ives’s home in Connecticut, Kirkpatrick first became aware of Ives’s music via a chance encounter with a copy of the Concord Sonata in Paris (p. 19). It was also during this time that Kirkpatrick showed the initial signs of his future editorial career, as he began to suggest edits during his copying work for Roy Harris (p. 22).

The second chapter, “Mentorship,” outlines Kirkpatrick’s time with two small music presses (Valley Music Press and Music Press), and especially his role as editor and mentor to Hunter Johnson (1906–1998), Robert Palmer (1915–2010), and Ross Lee Finney (1906–1997). All three of these composers were representatives of the accessible, nationalist American style of the 1940s—a predominantly tonal style, which was potentially profitable if published (p. 30). Kirkpatrick’s role in music publishing during this period is interesting and perhaps essential to providing a complete picture of his activities, but the real value in this section is found in the brief material on Johnson and Palmer, who are almost completely forgotten at this point.

In the third chapter, Massey dives directly into the heart of Kirkpatrick’s editorial career, with an investigation of his collaborative work...