Selected Correspondence of Charles Ives (review)

In these days of hurried, often vacuous, e-mail messages and the presumption of intimacy, where one is called by one's first name from the outset, it is refreshing to read letters written with a certain deliberateness, civility, and formality, even if such qualities may strike one as somewhat quaint. Reading the correspondence of Charles Ives, written some fifty to a hundred years ago, gives us more than a glance into both the every day life and creative world of the man many consider to be America's greatest composer. While Ives will always remain an enigmatic figure in many ways, the opportunity to see another part of his world, through his letter writing, is helpful in gaining a more complete picture of this giant of a man who gave listeners and performers some of the most serene music ever composed as well as music of jolting dissonance.

Thomas C. Owens has added substantially to the world of Ives scholarship with this book. Owens previously edited sixty-one pieces of Ives's correspondence for Charles Ives and His World ( J. Peter Burk holder, ed. [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996]: pp. 199–270). Selected Correspondence of Charles Ives, given over to an additional 453 letters, most of which are new to this book, forms a valuable companion to his earlier work.

The portrait of Ives that emerges from these letters is quite different from the one that many hold of the composer. While there is no question that Ives remains the reticent, independent New Englander, eager to preserve his privacy, he was, contrary to a generally accepted myth, actively involved with seeking the publication of his music, as letters to Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell, and Nicolas Slonimsky attest.

In addition, we learn that Ives was neither indifferent to the performances of his works nor was his music performed infrequently in the 1930s and 1940s. He was generous with suggestions in his correspondence for solving the considerable performance problems in some of his music. Radiana Pazmor, who sang many of Ives's songs in the 1930s, John Kirkpatrick, who began his studies of the Concord Sonata in 1927, eighteen-year-old Lou Harrison, who wrote asking Ives for copies of the piano sonatas, were among the performers who received the benefit of comments from the composer. Enough of the music intelligentsia in the 1930s and early 1940s knew Ives's music that Henry Cowell and Elliott Carter proposed to form a Charles Ives Society. Ives's response, so typical of him, was that "not only his name but the names of all American composers your committee approves of can be nailed all over it" (letter no. 390, pp. 313–14).

Another part of the inaccurate Ives portrait is that he was out of touch with the music world once he retired from active composition in the 1920s. To the contrary, Ives's correspondence shows that he was familiar with some of the most important figures in the world of contemporary music in America from the 1920s through the 1940s. Chief among his correspondents were John Becker, Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, John Kirkpatrick, Carl Ruggles, and Nicolas Slonimsky. Some other important composers knew his music and commented on it in letters or memos to him. Charles Martin wrote to Ives that George Gershwin—then at the height of his fame as a composer of popular song—"was very much interested in your compositions and would like to meet you" (15 May 1934; letter no. 280, p. 221). While the meeting never took place, Ives later wrote that Gershwin claimed "he had gotten more out of my [i.e., Ives's] music than of any other especially new chords and new rhythms" (unsent comments of Charles Ives appended to letter no. 280). Arnold Schoenberg's widow, Gertrude, sent a memo to Ives on which her husband had written that Ives was "a great man—a composer" (17 November 1953; p. 212, note 5...