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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
‘The composer’, begins the chapter on music in Harold Stearns's 1922 compendium, Civilization in the United States, ‘here lives in an atmosphere that is, at the worst, good-natured contempt. Contempt, mind you, not for himself … but for his very art …At best, what he gets is unintelligent admiration, not as an artist, but as a freak’. The best that the composer can expect, the article continues, is that by expressing himself he may, by some miraculous accident, express the great remote and inarticulate ‘American soul’. This same year, 1922, saw the publication, at the author's expense, of 114 Songs by the remote but very articulate composer and insurance agent, Charles E. Ives. This book of songs was a result of an effort, as the composer put it, to clean house – to hang out on the line for all to see the result of twenty-five years of ignored composition. When the songs and other compositions of this incredibly creative period were sorted, one would find, as the Stearns article suggested, an expression of the American soul, no longer so remote and inarticulate.
1 See the essay, ‘Music’, by Taylor, Deems, in Stearns, Harold E., Civilization in the United States (New York, 1922).Google Scholar
2 Lawrence, D. H., Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1923), p. 54Google Scholar (Viking Compass Edition).
3 Moor, Paul, ‘On Horseback to Heaven: Charles Ives’, Harper's Magazine, 09 1948, Pp. 65–73.Google Scholar
4 Quoted in Taubman, Howard, ‘Posterity Catches Up With Charles Ives’, New York Times Magazine, 23 10 1949, pp. 15 ff.Google Scholar
5 Quoted in Henry, and Cowell, Sidney, Charles Ives and His Music (New York, 1955), pp. 24, 18.Google Scholar
6 Quoted in Ives, Charles, ‘Some “Quarter-Tone” Impressions’, in Boatwright, Howard (ed.), Essays Before a Sonata, The Majority, and Other Writings by Charles Ives (New York, 1961), p. 111.Google Scholar
7 Quoted from an unfinished autobiographical manuscript, in Cowell and Cowell, op. cit., p. 30.
8 Ibid., p. 23.
9 Quoted in Taubman, , ‘Posterity Catches Up With Charles Ives’Google Scholar, loc. cit., pp. 15 ff.
10 Quoted in Mellers, Wilfrid, Music in a New Found Land (London, 1964), p. 47Google Scholar. See too the poem quoted in Kirkpatrick, John (ed.), A Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue of the Music Manuscripts and Related Materials of Charles Edward Ives, 1874–1954 (Yale School of Music, 1960), p. iiiGoogle Scholar, which reads in part, ‘what this inner something is which begets all this [that is, music], /is something no one knows –/especially those who define it/and use it primarily to make a living’.
11 One student of Ives's life and work has claimed that Ives's rebelliousness was really against himself – that he was firmly in the grip of the genteel culture of turn-of-the-century America, and that his rebelliousness was really only a ceremonial act designed to assure himself of his own masculinity. This view would contend that Ives was a prisoner of his culture, that its insistence that he earn his living caused him to live two truncated lives, one alien to the other. Worst of all, this view has it, Ives's gentility caused him to reject the new, post-World War I mass consumption culture, and thus he became alienated from the vernacular culture which had inspired so much of his music. Such an argument seems, to this writer, to be moot, since one suspects that Ives without the eccentric intransigence would not have been Ives at all. If he had been less ‘genteel’, more willing to mix with the inchoate avant-garde music fraternity which existed in his time, perhaps he would have been a very much more peaceful man and a duller man. We got the music; maybe we should take both the man and the music as they are. See Rossiter, Frank R., Charles Ives and American Culture: The Process of Development, 1874–1921, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1970.Google Scholar
12 Ives, 's marginalia to Three Places in New EnglandGoogle Scholar, quoted in Kirkpatrick, , Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue, p. 16.Google Scholar
13 Ives, , Essays Before a Sonata, in Boatwright, p. 80Google Scholar. ‘R.F.O.G.’ is a humorously-combined allusion to FRCO (Fellow of the Royal College of Organists) and FAGO (Fellow of the American Guild of Organists).
14 Ibid., p. 93.
15 Ives, 's marginalia to the Third Violin SonataGoogle Scholar, in Kirkpatrick, , Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue, p. 79.Google Scholar
16 Quoted in Cowell and Cowell, op. cit., pp. 69–70.
17 Ives, 's marginalia to The One WayGoogle Scholar, in Kirkpatrick, , Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue, p. 210.Google Scholar
18 Quoted in Salzman, Eric, ‘Charles Ives, American’, Commentary, Aug. 1968.Google Scholar
19 Ives, , Essays Before a Sonata, in Boatwright, p. 8Google Scholar; see also Salzman, , ‘Charles Ives, American’, p. 43.Google Scholar
20 Ibid., pp. 91–2.
21 Ibid., p. 92.
22 A lyric written by Ives indicates the importance to him of the continuing presentness of the past: ‘All that is best in me’, he wrote in the song Down East, ‘lying deep in memory’. See Ives, Charles, 114 Songs, pp. 126–7.Google Scholar
23 See Henderson, Clayton Wilson, Quotation as a Style Element in the Music of Charles Ives, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Washington University, 1969.Google Scholar
24 See Chase, Gilbert, ‘Composer from Connecticut’, in America's Music (New York, second edition, 1966), p. 408Google Scholar: ‘However modern it may be in “manner”, the “substance” of Ives's music has its sources in the past – not so much the past as history but the past as a continuing tradition, the past surviving in the present, as it does, for instance, in folklore. We can take almost the whole body of American folk and popular music, as we have traced it from the early psalmody and hymnody of New England, through the camp-meeting songs and revival spirituals, the blackface tunes and barn dances, the village church choirs, the patriotic songs and ragtime – and we can feel that all this has been made into the substance of Ives's music, not imitated but assimilated, used as a musical heritage belonging to him by birthright’.
25 Marginalia to the First Piano Sonata, in Kirkpatrick, , Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue, p. 83.Google Scholar
26 See Nash, Roderick, ‘The American Cult of the Primitive’, American Quarterly (Fall 1966), pp. 517–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for the opinion that Americans in the first years of the twentieth century were undergoing some kind of anxious fear that as a nation they had become middle-aged. Richard Hofstadter's concept of a ‘psychic crisis’ in the America of the 1890s refers to the same phenomenon. See The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York, 1965), pp. 147–51.Google Scholar
27 Rosenfeld, Paul, ‘Charles Ives, Pioneer Atonalist’, New Republic, 20 07 1932, pp. 262–4.Google Scholar
28 Kolodin, Irving, ‘Music to My Ears: Trio in the Museum, Ives in Central Park’, Saturday Review, 19 05 1962, p. 26Google Scholar; and Mellers, , Music in a New Found Land, p. 46.Google Scholar
29 Ives, , Essays Before a Sonata, in Boatwright, p. 54.Google Scholar
30 Ives, , ‘The Majority’, in Boatwright, p. 188.Google Scholar
31 See Cowell and Cowell, op. cit., p. 161; and Schrade, Leo, ‘Charles E. Ives: 1874–1954’, The Yale Review, 06 1955, pp. 535–45.Google Scholar
32 Quoted in ‘The Transcendentalist’, Newsweek, 10 May 1965, pp. 101–2.Google Scholar
33 See Davidson, Audrey, ‘Transcendental Unity in the Works of Charles Ives’, American Quarterly (Spring 1970), pp. 34–44, especially pp. 38–9.Google Scholar
34 Ives, , ‘The Majority’, in Boatwright, p. 22.Google Scholar
35 Ives, , Essays Before a Sonata, in Boatwright, p. 22.Google Scholar
36 Quoted in Kirkpatrick, John (ed.), Ives, Eleven Songs and Two Harmonizations (New York, 1968), pp. iii–iv.Google Scholar
37 Cowell, Henry, ‘Charles E. Ives’, in Cowell, Henry (ed.), American Composers on American Music (New York, 1933), pp. 133–4.Google Scholar
38 Quoted in Ewen, David, Composers Since 1900 (New York, 1969), pp. 298–9.Google Scholar
39 Quoted in Sargeant, Winthrop, ‘Musical Events’, The New Yorker, 8 05 1965, p. 169Google Scholar; the occasion for this article was the first performance of Ives's Fourth Symphony by Leopold Stokowski and the American Symphony Orchestra.
40 Quoted in Hitchcock, H. Wiley, Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1969), p. 169.Google Scholar
41 Mellers, , Music in a New Found Land, pp. 48–50.Google Scholar
42 See ibid., pp. 54–6, 57; and Cowell, and Cowell, , Charles Ives and His Music, p. 201.Google Scholar
43 See Cowell and Cowell, op. cit., pp. 142–3.
44 Henry, and Cowell, Sidney, ‘Charles Ives’, Perspectives USA (Autumn 1955), pp. 38–56.Google Scholar
45 Ives, , Essays Before a Sonata, in Boatwright, p. 36Google Scholar; see too Mellers, Wilfred, Romanticism and the 20th Century (Fair Lawn, New Jersey, 1957), p. 220Google Scholar: ‘One of [Ives's] finest works, the “Concord” Piano Sonata, evokes Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau as representatives of American Strife, Conscience, and Contemplation; and his art, like theirs, was in a profound sense a search for a new world‘.
46 Ives, , Essays Before a Sonata, in Boatwright, p. 36.Google Scholar
47 Ibid., pp. 46–7.
48 See the excellent analyses of the Concord Sonata in Mellers, , Music in a New Found Land, pp. 48–56Google Scholar, and in Cowell and Cowell, op. cit., pp. 190–201.
49 Ives's marginalia to the Second String Quartet, in Kirkpatrick, , Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue, p. 60.Google Scholar
50 Ives, , Essays Before a Sonata, in Boatwright. p. 31.Google Scholar
51 Quoted in Chase, , America's Music, p. 419.Google Scholar
52 See the analysis of the Universe Symphony in Cowell and Coweil, op. cit., pp. 201–3, which includes the quotation at length of Ives's remarks, in the autobiographical manuscript, concerning the Universe Symphony.
53 Ives's marginalia to the Universe Symphony, in Kirkpatrick, , Temporary Mimeographed Catalogue, pp. 26–8.Google Scholar
54 Quoted in Cowell and Cowell, op. cit., p. 203.
55 From The Works and Days of Hesiod.
56 From the Theogony of Hesiod.
57 Ives, (music and words), ‘The New River’, in New Music, Oct. 1933, pp. 42–3.Google Scholar
58 Ives's marginalia to ‘Gup the Blood’, quoted in Gunther Schuller's programme notes to Columbia recording, MS 7318, ‘Calcium Light Night’.
59 Ives, , ‘A People's World Nation’, in Boatwright, p. 229.Google Scholar
60 Ives, (music and words), ‘He is There I’ in 114 Songs, pp. 107–11.Google Scholar
61 Cowell and Cowell, op. cit., p. 75.
62 Thomson, Virgil, American Music Since 1910 (London, 1970), p. 29Google Scholar; see also Yates, Peter, Twentieth Century Music (New York, 1967), p. 254Google Scholar, and Boatwright, Howard's introductory note to Essays, p. xvii.Google Scholar
63 Quoted in Cowell and Cowell, op. cit., pp. 75–6.
64 Ives, (music and words), ‘On the Antipodes’ (composed c. 1915–24), in New Music (Oct. 1935), Pp. 44–7.Google Scholar
65 Ives, , Essays Before a Sonata, in Boatwright, p. 29Google Scholar; this sentence is quoted by Ives (inexactly) in ‘The Majority’. See Boatwright, , p. 144.Google Scholar
66 Ibid., p. 73.
67 Ives, , ‘The Majority’, in Boatwright, pp. 195, 146, 172, 150 respectively.Google Scholar
68 See Boatwright, 's introductory note ro ‘Concerning a Twentieth Amendment’, in Essays, pp. 200–3.Google Scholar
69 The Taft letter is in ibid., p. 210.
70 Quoted in Cowell and Cowell, op. cit., p. iv.
71 Ibid., p. 72.
72 Ibid., p. 69.
73 Evett, Robert, ‘Music Letter: A Post-Mortem for Mr. Ives’, The Kenyon Review (Autumn 1954), Pp. 628–36.Google Scholar
74 For the ‘1024th notes’, see Cowell and Cowell, op. Cit., p. 199.
75 ‘Double Indemnity’, Time Magazine, 23 Feb. 1948, pp. 66–7.Google Scholar
76 ‘Ives Revived’, Newsweek, 14 Oct. 1963, p. 65.Google Scholar
77 See Daniel, Oliver, ‘Ives is a Four-Letter Word’, Saturday Review, 25 03 1968, p. 59.Google Scholar
78 ‘Customers’ Likes and Dislikes are Revealed in N.Y. Dealer Survey’, Billboard, 23 April 1966, p. 46.Google Scholar
79 Quoted in Taubman, , ‘Posterity Catches Up With Charles Ives’, pp. 15 ff.Google Scholar
80 Quoted in Moor, Paul, ‘On Horseback to Heaven’, p. 73.Google Scholar