Review Essay: Charles Ives: A Life with Music

Charles Ives has had several lives, literally and figuratively. Born in 1874, he was first the athletic, gregarious product of small-city New England. Danbury’s prosperity in the 1880s helped him flourish as well, and he usually sported oddly-shaped hats in its honor. He thrived at Yale, at that time small, philistine, and conformist. He enjoyed a few post-collegiate years in New York City, building a reputation as a shrewd insurance man. His health often seemed shaky and his behavior eccentric, but marriage and success kept him psychologically stable enough to compose vast amounts of music that few wanted to hear once and none wanted to hear twice. A presumptive heart attack ended his active composition late in 1918 and slowed his business career in the 1920s. When he could, he wrote brief accounts of his work and published songs, shorter works, or excerpts from more complex ones. Recognition came slowly, from young modernists delighted to find a role model wealthy enough to subvent journals and performances, and from a few hardy performers, ranging from pianist E. Robert Schmitz to conductors Leonard Bernstein and Leopold Stokowski. Prizes and publicity finally poured in as ill health made their enjoyment difficult. Ives died in 1954, leaving much undone.

These three phases of youthful normality, creative vigor in both music and business, and then decline amidst growing fame, are barely the beginning of the story. The fourth phase would be the period from 1955, when Henry and Sidney Cowell published their brief, devout sketch, through the editing of Ives’s essays and autobiographical jottings, up to the centennial year of 1974, when Vivian Perlis issued her remarkable oral history and conferences in New York and New Haven gathered remarkable and enthusiastic numbers of participants to meet, talk, and listen, both to each other and to a significant number of important performances. Two significant secondary studies opened new lines of interest; music departments were finally permitting dissertations on American subjects; and a lack of the usual archival materials led many to believe that the story was largely complete. ¹

These volumes were only the tip of a growing iceberg, as dissertations multiplied on such subjects as aspects of the music, Ives’s reading, his teachers, his habit of quoting an astonishing number of tunes, his father’s band tradition, and so on, too long to elaborate usefully here. Most of this work was by musicologists, and only occasionally by a literary critic or a conventionally-trained historian. Interested chiefly in the music, scholars filled their pages with pity quotes from the two edited volumes, finding to no one’s surprise that the music illustrated the words and that the pioneer modernist had been something of a late-blooming transcendentalist. Although several voices insisted that Ives was in fact a progressive, a realist, a pragmatist, and a devoutly religious man, who fit in well to traditional historical categories, many musicologists preferred to ignore them. Ives’s experiments had to be modernist—to argue otherwise was to deny the obvious fact that such important composers as Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, John Cage, and especially Lou Harrison had studied the music, fought with it, denied or exploited it, in much the same way that poets struggled with Ezra Pound’s Cantos and novelists with James Joyce’s Ulysses. As poststructuralism spread even into music criticism, history seemed irrelevant anyway. He was what they did.

In the midst of such attention, it was perhaps inevitable that Ives would run into mainstream musicologists whose eyebrows couldn’t rise high enough to express their skepticism at the abilities of this rude pioneer. “Another variety of pure Americanism, the bizarre unintegrated mixture of daring sophistication and homespun crudity in the music of Charles Ives” clearly did not even make it into the ranks of the properly housebroken, in the widely distributed opinion of Gerald Abraham, in his Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music (824). More serious was the charge of the venerable Maynard Solomon, fresh from well-regarded studies of...