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  • Mad Music: Charles Ives, the Nostalgic Rebel by Stephen Budiansky
  • Warren Kimball
Mad Music: Charles Ives, the Nostalgic Rebel. By Stephen Budiansky. Lebanon, NH: ForeEdge, 2014. ISBN 978-1-61168-399-8. Cloth. Pp. 306. $40.00.

Stephen Budiansky’s Mad Music is an enlightening new biography of Charles Ives that proves relevant for both the serious scholar and nonspecialist reader. Since the appearance of Henry and Sidney Cowell’s 1955 biography of the composer, Ives’s story has undergone much revision at the hands of musicologists and historians.

Perhaps the single most vexing point of discussion has been the nature of Ives’s “serious illness” of 1918, which most scholars argue forced him to cease composing new works by the early 1920s. Most of Ives’s early biographers, including Frank Rossiter, have accepted the explanation Ives himself typically offered when questioned about the change in his productivity: that he had suffered a heart attack.1 In his 1992 biography, Stuart Feder, a psychoanalyst who had access to Ives’s medical records, questioned the heart attack hypothesis and argued that Ives’s decline in compositional output was instead the result of a prolonged period of mourning over the death of his father some twenty-four years earlier.2 Gayle Sherwood Magee argued against Feder’s hypothesis in a contentious 2001 colloquium in the Journal of the American Musicological Society and in her 2008 book Charles Ives Reconsidered.3 Magee argued that Ives suffered from an affliction that would have been diagnosed at the time as “neurasthenia,” a nervous condition usually associated with the well-to-do and often treated with “rest cures” to scenic enclaves such as Lake Saranac in the Adirondacks, which Ives and his wife, Harmony, frequented. Budiansky convincingly takes issue with all of these hypotheses. Drawing primarily upon Ives’s medical records and a candid letter he wrote to his friend Clifton Furness in 1930, Budiansky shows that Ives was first diagnosed with diabetes in 1918, and his failing health was the probable source of his “artistic decline” from that point forward.

Budiansky’s book, while lacking an overarching theme, maintains a revisionist perspective throughout. Although writing as a historian and not as a musicologist, Budiansky pulls no punches in discussing previous Ives scholarship by musicologists and music theorists, criticizing, for example, Peter Burkholder’s periodization of Ives’s compositional output (158–59) and labeling his term “cumulative form” as “didactic and incomplete” (144). Budiansky goes against the modern current of Ives scholarship by downplaying the role that Horatio Parker—whom he describes as “more than a bit of a snob” (79)—played in Ives’s musical development and emphasizing the early instruction of his father, George E. Ives, as seminal to his development. Recent scholars, notably Burkholder and Robert P. Morgan, have sought to tie Ives’s music to the “classical tradition” of European art music, particularly through his exposure to such music as an organist and as the result of his studies with Horatio Parker at Yale. Scholarship in this vein has sought to reclaim Ives from the grip of the so-called Ives legend, in which he is fashioned as a self-taught American maverick who worked in isolation from most European composers. Budiansky affirms that it was Parker’s [End Page 402] instruction that “irrefutably gave him his first real introduction to the larger forms of serious composition” (82) but contends that “there were a number of ‘serious’ works indubitably dating from Ives’s time at Yale that already show an audacity and originality in re-thinking traditional forms, or in pushing beyond any and all conventional harmonic and formal boundaries that Parker tried to enforce” (83). Budiansky even questions the “Ives legend” as a concept, claiming that it is “something of a legend itself” (46) and arguing that “it takes a willful misreading” of Ives’s own writings to infer that he was trying to self-consciously fashion himself and his father as “native musical geniuses arising spontaneously out of American soil” (47). These statements are well argued and should continue to fuel debates concerning Ives’s musical influences.

Budiansky’s skills as a historical writer shine throughout the book...

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