Charles Ives Reconsidered

by Gayle Sherwood Magee
University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2008
256 pp., illus. 34 b/w. Paper, $35.00
ISBN: 978-0-252-03326-1.

Reviewed by Katharina Blassnigg
University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna


kblassnigg@hotmail.com



Gayle Sherwood Magee is an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and author of Charles Ives: A Guide to Research (2002), a comprehensively annotated guide to the most significant literature on Ives (it includes English and foreign-language books, monographs, articles, chapters, dissertations and masters theses). Her most recent book Charles Ives Reconsidered is a valuable edition to the existing literature and offers the timely reconsideration of Ives and his music.

Magee’s book contains detailed references to resources and scholarly research; however, the writing style of Charles Ives Reconsidered aspires to communicate as much to the music theorist, as it does to the musician and to the non-specialist reader with a passing interest in Ives or 20th century music. One of the great assets of the book, aside from Magee’s music specialist knowledge, is her ambitious approach to drawing out a wide interdisciplinary network and context to Ives’ life and work. Very much in the style of New Historicist practice, she succeeds in presenting these complex layers of influences and connections with great clarity and transparency particularly in her sophisticated use of historical resources and related materials.

Magee gives detailed descriptions of the circumstances that influenced and impacted on Ives’ compositional work and style. These include the changing cultural-political environment, the contemporary public debate about American musical identity in relation to the role of his father, and Ives’ own status as a nationally established model of the American organist-composer. Magee also addresses the performances of international musical traditions at the Columbian exposition 1892 in Chicago (in particular the German-European tradition), the background of Professor Horatio Parker and the musical curriculum offered by him at Yale along with non-musical issues such as the insurance industry, and Ives’ neurasthenia, heart palpitations, and tachycardia, first diagnosed and treated in late 1906, which culminated in his breakdown in October 1918. Other topics that she covers concern his professional relations, such as his attempts to engage others in his music and his two parallel careers — business and music, the political attitude of the Americans during the First World War, and his connections to musicians and peers like E. Robert Schmitz, Henry Cowell, Elliott Carter, and John Kirkpatrick.

The scope of this new biography is necessary for one of the main intentions of this book, which is to revisit the personal legends that have accompanied Charles Ives’ work over years. Even before his death Ives had already been credited with diverse myths, which, as in all narratives, are only partially based on facts — many of them, it turns out, are based on spurious or restricted evidence, or simply exaggerations that ignore the place of his oeuvre within the historical context. Magee reexamines many of these assumptions and persistent ideas by taking a close look at archival evidence such as published texts and scores, documented performances, eyewitness testimony, extracts from correspondence, published reviews and historical and contemporary critical assessments. She situates Ives’ musical output and his personal relationships with his father, his wife Harmony Twichell, his teachers (in particularly the Yale professor Horatio Parker) and his peers in a much broader context than commonly considered within the cultural, economical, political, social and musical environment during Ives’ life. In this way Magee offers a new perspective based on extensive historical research including a revised chronology of his oeuvre.

One particular difficulty that Magee faces and confronts concerns the compositional development of Ives’ work that lies in the fact that he revised his works later in his life. His marginalia are scattered all over his manuscripts and go back to diverse periods in his life such that later ideas have been incorporated into works that were dated much earlier. Based on extensive paper-type and handwriting analysis Magee suggests new dates and periodisation for the manuscript sources of Ives’ compositions, which she draws from, among other sources, her earlier collaboration on Ives’ work with J. Peter Burkholder and James B. Sinclair in “Charles Ives: Works“, for Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy. Even though Magee admits that it is impossible to fully resolve when and why Ives revised some works, and thus to categorize effectively his musical career, nevertheless, her revisions and the new chronology allow a much clearer understanding of how he approached composition at various times in his life.

Magee has successfully accepted this challenge that any biographical account poses, and she proposes a comprehensively revised overview. The first period (1886 – 1902) encompasses three overlapping sub-periods: Between 1886 and 1894 Ives stayed in Danbury and his training and early experience were very much in tune with his father’s ambitions, those of a mid-century amateur musician. George Ives maintained a nationalist American style of composition; his exposure to European music was limited to Italian opera and operetta hits. Ives’ Yale period (1894 – 98) shows the influences of his Professor Horatio Parker and the Austro-German tradition. After graduating, during the first years in New York (1898 – 1902) he attempted to reconcile these two attitudes. However, in 1902 Ives gave up music“ (as he put it in his own words) and started a business career in an insurance office; as a consequence during the following five years he hardly wrote any new works.

In the first part of his second compositional period (1907 – 1914), which coincided with his courtship and early marriage, Ives developed a nationalist, unconventional, (in harmonic and formal terms) and nostalgic style that used primarily hymn and gospel tunes as source material. During the First World War (1914 – 18) his compositions took a militaristic touch and his texts, programs, and patriotic quotations invoked earlier wars and caught the jingoistic mood of the time, while in his music the nationalist American style vied with the tonal and formal dictates of the German and larger European tradition.

In his final main compositional period (1919 – 29) Ives rejected the national tradition in most of his new works. On the one hand, he attempted to recapture his earlier innocence on the other hand he was writing completely new, modernist works and revised earlier ideas according to his continuously evolving aesthetic values. During this period Ives made connections within the New York experimental musical community; in this way he was influenced by the ideas of those around him. By the late 1920s he had a wide-ranging circle of peers, critics, and admirers who responded with growing respect to his works. However, after 1929 Ives’ musical activities were limited to occasional revisions. He used most of his creative energy for the recording of his autobiographical writings, the Memos. Magee argues that these writings were very much influenced by the ideas and values of his close friend Henry Cowell (who was eager to promote pro-American, progressive and anti-European views). Despite later opinions that after Ives’ breakdown in 1918 he stopped composing for good due to ill-health, Magee shows that Ives was practicing as a composer in this decade also, revising earlier works but also producing new pieces. Magee argues that this return to an earlier work with a view to revision was also part of the creative process of an active composer.

It is to Magee’s great credit that she has given us an informed revision of Ives’ biography without subjecting it to authorial whim and loosing sight of Ives as the musician; in this process she makes Ives’ often difficult and always provocative work all the more accessible and invites further research into the life and oeuvre of other musicians based on solid archival evidence with a fresh approach.