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6 Ives at Century’s Turn “Is an icon becoming a has-been?”1 This was the question New York Times critic Donal Henahan posed in April 1987, after Leonard Bernstein decided to cancel a scheduled performance of Ives’s Fourth Symphony. Indeed there was evidence that a certain amount of ennui had set in with respect to Ives. A few weeks earlier, in a Times survey of high-profile musicians, several participants had nominated him “most over-rated composer.”2 On the other side of the country,Los Angeles critic Herbert Glass observed that there had been a “general decline in Ives’s stock since the overexposure attending the 1974 centenary,”and, he added, it was a shame that the “lovely, listenable” works had been consigned to oblivion “along with the more off-putting creations of Ol’ Charlie, sometime musical bogeyman and ear-stretcher.”3 Glass’s quip at Ol’Charlie’s expense was mild in comparison to the accusation musicologist Maynard Solomon leveled against the composer that fall. Ives, Solomon pronounced, had engaged in a “systematic pattern of falsification” to safeguard his claims at the patent-house of musical modernism.During the twenties,he had methodologically upped the dissonance in his compositions,crafted lists that backdated his works,and added marginalia in the manuscripts that would corroborate the false dates.4 For Ives scholars, Solomon’s indictment was especially irksome because of the forum in which it was lodged: the preeminent publication of musical scholarship, the Journal of the American Musicological Society. Never before had the journal’s editors deigned to publish a feature article about Ives, and now in 1987, some twenty years after Ives had become par for musicological discourse,he made his debut as one of the greatest musical perjurers of all time. Though Solomon’s criticisms were devastating, they served as the catalyst for an explosion of scholarly activity centered on Ives in the nineties.Rebutting Paul_Text.indd 186 3/1/13 10:06 AM Ives at Century’s Turn · 187 Solomon became a vital industry that attracted a host of musicologists, longtime Ives stalwarts and neophytes alike. Their approaches varied, some working within the traditional framework of musicological methodologies, others venturing tactics associated with what came to be known as “New Musicology.” The old tools of paleographic and stylistic analysis were deployed alongside new techniques that prioritized social context and stressed the contingency of musical meaning. Ultimately, Solomon’s accusations would be rebuffed, but to this day, his article remains unsurpassed as the most influential scholarly essay ever written about Ives. As Ives scholarship boomed in the nineties,his sagging reputation in the concert hall also lifted, though for different reasons. The main factor was the broad acceptance of a new version of an old myth.Ives was no longer simply the icon of Americanindividualismandlonepioneerofmusicalmodernism,butthepatriarch of a lineage of composers linked by their penchant for experiment: the American Mavericks. The etiology of this myth and the vicissitudes of Ives scholarship at the turn of the twentieth century are the subjects of this final chapter. Ives on the Couch When, in 1987, Solomon broached the question of chronology in Ives’s oeuvre , he did so from a vantage that was unusual in the field of musicology. The evidence he mustered to support his assertion about Ives’s duplicity was paleographical and comfortably within the bounds of disciplinary discourse. It was harnessed, however, to a psychoanalytical theory about the motivations behind the campaign of misinformation Solomon imputed to Ives. Psychobiography had been a preoccupation of Solomon’s ever since he entered the musicological world in the seventies with a controversial biography of Beethoven. As far as the output of musical scholars was concerned, that book and the subsequent Ives article sat on a sparsely populated shelf. But there was ample precedent in other academic disciplines. Beginning in the fifties, a subset of professional historians had availed themselves of the explanatory potential of psychoanalysis.5 On the whole,their preference was not for orthodox Freudianism but for so-called “ego psychology,”which focused on the member of the psychoanalytic tripartite that mediated between the unconscious animal drives of the Id and the dictates of society issuing from the Superego. Ego psychology appealed because it stressed conditioning factors arising from social (and thus historical) context, mitigating the biological reductionism of Freud. One of its most influential practitioners, Erik Erikson, provided a model in his Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (1957).The book...

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