Breaking Time’s Arrow: Experiment and Expression in the Music of Charles Ives by Matthew McDonald (review)

Music and meaning scholars are beginning to venture into post-tonal territory, but their work is often marred by anxiety about skeptics. For example, the first eight chapters of Music and Narrative since 1900, edited by Michael L. Klein and Nicholas Reyland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), seek to defend the plausibility of narrative analyses of post-tonal works. Almost half of the essays in the collection are dedicated to scholarly self-preservation, while the remaining eleven chapters present narrative analyses of particular compositions.

For this reason, it is refreshing to see a book-length study on the music of Charles Ives that is thoroughly grounded in hermeneutics. Matthew McDonald’s Breaking Time’s Arrow: Experiment and Expression in the Music of Charles Ives breaks new ground in Ives research—no prior book-length Ivesian study has been as dedicated to interpretation. Most recent Ives studies are musicological and are dedicated to historical issues, especially biography, chronology, influence, Ives’s health problems, and reception history.¹ Recent musical theoretical studies on Ives’s music tend to ingrain a formalist attitude, seeking to answer questions about how Ives’s music is structured.² Even research that seems ripe with interpretive potential, such as J. Peter Burkholder’s All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowings—a tome dedicated to the categorization of Ives’s techniques of musical quotation, or “borrowings” as Burkholder terms them—does not concentrate on hermeneutic possibilities.³ McDonald’s work is a much-needed divergence from the norms of Ives scholarship.

Breaking Time’s Arrow is structured in two parts, each consisting of three chapters. Part 1 focuses on three dualities in the music of Charles Ives: God/Man, Composer/Individual, and Intuition/Expression. Each these chapters centers on interpretive analyses of two works, which are roughly arranged in chronological order. Part 2 targets broader issues of music and meaning, although the chapters in this part loosely reflect the same three dualities as Part 1. In Part 2, McDonald examines issues of narrativity, temporality, and form, culminating in three in-depth analyses. One of the book’s strengths is its broad range of repertoire. Instead of focusing solely on one genre, McDonald analyzes works for piano, voice, orchestra, chorus, string quartet, and chamber ensemble, a variety that especially welcomes analysts of all musical backgrounds in a field often dominated by genre-specific research. The book also features multiple photographs of Ivesian sketches, a relative rarity in Ives studies, as well as several transcriptions and many unique recompositions that McDonald created himself.

Breaking Time’s Arrow speaks to the Ives expert; it is well researched and contains an impressive bibliography that would be a valuable resource for a scholar interested in investigating Ives literature. McDonald utilizes a healthy mix of primary and secondary sources, and relies on Ives’s own writings, marginalia, and sketches to support his arguments. Despite the book’s appeal to Ives experts, it is accessible to any music theorist or musicologist who is patient enough to closely read many pages of detailed musical analyses. McDonald scrutinizes Ives’s musical surfaces meticulously, facilitated by a clear writing style and straightforward organization. As with all books in the “Musical Meaning and Interpretation” series, the text is flawlessly edited and is utterly manageable, no doubt in part to Robert Hatten’s editorial fine-tuning.

Many of McDonald’s analyses reflect a dialogic underpinning. Although he does not explicitly draw on the terminology of James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy’s Elements of Sonata Theory, McDonald often seeks to establish Ivesian norms for comparative analysis.⁴ For example, in Chapter 2 there are observations about how Ives tends to attain melodic closure,⁵ in Chapter 3 there are generalizations on what Ives’s use of certain harmonic collections evokes,⁶ and throughout the book there are numerous references to particular key affects that Ives establishes—especially...