Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History, and: Charles Ives: A Guide to Research (review)

The appearance of these two books on Charles Ives in 2002 confirms the continuing resonance of this once-ignored composer in American musical thought. They join what has grown to become veritable shelves devoted to the life and music of one of the nation's most enigmatic and powerful artistic figures. Quite aside from the light they shed upon Ives himself, however, each provides insight into the various ways history is made, approached, and recorded.

Since its original Yale University Press publication in 1974 and the subsequent 1976 Norton Library edition, Vivian Perlis's Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History has demonstrated what oral history can achieve, as well as what it can enable. Perlis recognized both the seminal importance of the composer in America's music history and the dwindling number of friends, acquaintances, and family members who could offer firsthand accounts and set out to track down and record the thoughts of as many of these people as she could find. Reminiscences by business acquaintances, admiring younger composers, family members, neighbors, scholars, and performers simultaneously softened and complicated our image of the composer, which had often been restricted to the unidimensional role of crusty old curmudgeon. Within the pages of Charles Ives Remembered we hear of Ives as a sensitive and generous employer, as a family prankster, and as a loving husband, father, and uncle. The picture that emerges is one of a deeply caring and profoundly human soul. When the Ives Proj- ect was completed, it numbered fifty-eight transcribed interviews, and became the foundation of Perlis's much larger effort, the Oral History American Music Project at Yale University. An archive of over one thousand audio and video interviews of American composers, it is the only ongoing project of its kind in the country. Perlis's oft-consulted collection of Ives interviews, photographs, reviews, letters, announcements, and manuscripts puts any questions regarding the validity of oral history as a research methodology to rest, for it is a source every Ives lover has pored over, and its usefulness has endured amidst major shifts in the practice of musicology itself.

The degree to which scholars have welcomed the opportunity to flesh out the essence of Ives speaks for a generation unwilling to accept received wisdom without challenge. No longer content to be satisfied with the limited and limiting romantic version of Ives as a malcontent operating in isolation, Charles Ives Remembered places this unique creative mind in context. In ways perhaps unintended, the humanizing of the composer elevates him beyond the confines of the nineteenth-century hero. In seeing more of ourselves in him, we are perhaps able to appreciate his remarkable distinctiveness even more. The many thoughtful and substantive reviews engendered by earlier printings of Charles Ives Remembered mitigate the need for yet another assessment of its contents. Suffice to say that the University of Illinois Press is to be commended for reissuing what J. Peter Burkholder calls "a treasure" (p. xi) and for continuing to make this kind of understanding possible.

Gayle Sherwood's Charles Ives: A Guide to Research revisits, supplements, and enlarges upon Geoffrey Block's seminal Charles Ives: A Bio-Bibliography (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), and is a valuable single- volume resource for Ives scholarship. Sherwood contextualizes her book with a short history of Ives studies and a timeline emphasizing "biographical milestones" (p. xiii). With its pithy synopses of major articles, books, reviews, dissertations and theses, its listings of significant festivals, conferences, and Web sites, and its updated catalog of "Ives's Works with Appropriate Dates of Composition" (p. 193), Sherwood's book, along with those of Vivian Perlis (cf. supra...