A Descriptive Catalogue of the Music of Charles Ives (review)

A Descriptive Catalogue of the Music of Charles Ives. By James B. Sinclair. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. [xxv, 752 p. ISBN 0-300-07601-0. $75.]

In January 1955, John Kirkpatrick (1905- 1991) persuaded Harmony Twichell Ives that her late husband's music manuscripts should be deposited not at the Library of Congress but at Yale, his alma mater, where they would be housed in a separate Ives Room. On Washington's Birthday, 1956, "the Ives Room was inaugurated with a reception and a concert, at which Helen Boatwright sang four . . . newly disclosed songs" (John Kirkpatrick, A Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue of the Music Manuscripts and Related Materials of Charles Edward Ives, 1874-1954 [New Haven: Library of the Yale School of Music, 1960], v). Kirkpatrick, the first and most famous performer of Ives's "Concord" Sonata and, in James Sinclair's words, "[a]n inveterate organizer with a pathological love for jigsaw puzzles" (p. x), had already, in 1954, started work on the task of cataloging the manuscripts. What he initially found in Ives's barn at West Redding, which had been converted into a music storeroom, must have been supremely dispiriting: "Evidently [Ives] was used to rummaging for things, pulling out whole fistfuls from underneath which then became the top layer, so that each drawerful [of manuscript pages] had been shuffled many times. Different leaves of the same copy appeared at different levels of different drawers. Few were together complete" (Kirkpatrick, v). Notwithstanding such chaos (and the fact that further manuscripts and photostats were liberally distributed among several other locations, including the Quality Photoprint Studio in New York City), Kirkpatrick's work was temporarily publishable in 1960, in the intentionally impermanent but much loved (and in my case much thumbed) Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue cited above. That it has taken nearly forty years for what one hopes is a permanent catalog to be published is a testament to not only the labyrinthine intricacies of Ives scholarship, but also the several setbacks that have dogged Kirkpatrick's successors in their admirable and heroic task.

Two fundamental questions face Ives scholars: What did he write, and when? One aspect of the "what?" is the cryptographic nightmare of Ives's sketches, score-sketches, scores, revised scores, patches, and copyists' scores, pointedly demonstrated by the seven figures following page xxv of Sinclair's catalog and confirmed in the deceptively simple (and lucid) discussion titled "Ives's Compositional Methods" that accompanies them (pp. xi-xii). It has sometimes struck me that if King Eurystheus had set Hercules a thirteenth labor, it would have been the deciphering of one of Ives's less legible scores. (It should be noted here that Sinclair's catalog has been published with the financial assistance of--among others--the Charles Ives Society, which has for the last quarter-century played a crucial role in bringing to the public critical editions of Ives's works. If this is a roundabout way of suggesting that the efforts of Ives's editors have been herculean, then so be it.) On the "when?" front, one has merely to allude to the chronological controversies that have surrounded Ives scholarship since the publication of Maynard Solomon's article "Charles Ives: Some Questions of Veracity" (Journal of the American Musicological Society 40 [1987]: 443-70). Sinclair's solution to this second problem is again deceptively simple: "the first date given . . . is a known date or an estimate based on available data and new research. Next are cited Ives's own dates" (p. xx). The results, though, may raise the occasional eyebrow; an example is the Symphony no. 1, which the worklists in Kirkpatrick and The New Grove Dictionary of American Music (4 vols. [London: Macmillan, 1986]) give respectively as 1896-98 and 1895-98. Sinclair, relying on evidence that is more recent, has: "Composed mostly c1898-1902, with the copyist full score made possibly as late as 1908-10" (p. 3).

The various hiccups that have delayed...