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 Charles
Ives and His World by J. Peter Burkholder (Editor)
This volume
shows Charles Ives in the context of his world in a number of
revealing ways. Five new essays examine Ives's relationships to
European music and to American music, politics, business, and
landscape. J. Peter Burkholder shows Ives as a composer well versed
in four distinctive musical traditions who blended them in his
mature music. Leon Botstein explores the paradox of how, in the
works of Ives and Mahler, musical modernism emerges from profoundly
antimodern sensibilities. David Michael Hertz reveals unsuspected
parallels between one of Ives's most famous pieces, the Concord
Piano Sonata, and the piano sonatas of Liszt and Scriabin. Michael
Broyles sheds new light on Ives's political orientation and on
his career in the insurance business, and Mark Tucker shows the
importance for Ives of his vacations in the Adirondacks and the
representation of that landscape in his music.
The remainder
of the book presents documents that illuminate Ives's personal
life. A selection of some sixty letters to and from Ives and his
family, edited and annotated by Tom C. Owens, is the first substantial
collection of Ives correspondence to be published. Two sections
of reviews and longer profiles published during his lifetime highlight
the important stages in the reception of Ives's music, from his
early works through the premieres of his most important compositions
to his elevation as an almost mythic figure with a reputation
among some critics as America's greatest composer.
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