A Biography Of Charles Ives
"Mad Music, Charles Ives, the Nostalgic Rebel" (2014) by Stephen Budiansky is a highly engaging, absorbing, and thoughtful biography of the great American composer Charles Ives (1874 -- 1954) and a story of the lost America of his era. Although Ives' music remained obscure during much of his life, the composer has not lacked biographers, including, for example, recent studies by Jan Swafford, "Charles Ives: A Life with Music" and Gayle Magee "Charles Ives Reconsidered". Unlike these and other Ives biographers, Budiansky is not primarily a scholar of music. He is instead a highly regarded author of books on military history and on natural history who has also written some short, provocative articles on the state of contemporary musical education. Budiansky received a Guggenhiem Fellowship to research and write his book on Ives. He states that the work is "the culmination of a decade of my own absorbing fascination with Ives and his music and the nineteenth century New England milieu from which he sprang. I've tried to explain the incredible power of his artistic vision, explore his life, and delve into the inspirations and ideals that shaped his unique character." Budiansky succeeds admirably in his aims.
The book proceeds in broad strokes with an eye for telling and important events rather than for microscopic detail. Budiansky explores the key events in Ives' life, including his childhood in Danbury, Connecticut, his college years at Yale, his early years starting out as a young insurance clerk, and his marriage, at 33, to Harmony Twichell. From 1902 -- 1918, Ives was a pioneer in the business of selling life insurance and became wealthy while also writing without recognition most of his important musical compositions. In 1918, Ives was diagnosed with diabetes which at the time was largely incurable. His health and his work in both music and insurance went into steep decline. Ives withdrew into himself even while, beginning in the late 1920s his musical accomplishment began to be recognized. Among other recognitions, Ives received a Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for his Third Symphony. He reacted with a degree of curmudgeonly aloofness.
If there is a single pivotal event that Budiansky describes, it occurred in 1902 when a young Charles Ives was disappointed at the indifferent response he received for an early work, a lengthy sacred cantata, "The Celestial Country", at a public performance. Ives quit his position as a church organist and vowed to "give up music". Budiansky shows that Ives "gave up music" in the sense of becoming self-reliant as opposed to looking to the public for immediate approval of his efforts. When Ives "gave up music" he began his years of greatest compositional productivity.
Budiansky also paints Ives' character broadly, including his Emerson-Thoreau derived Transcendentalism, his Yankee toughness, his independence, his increasingly reclusive and isolated character, explosive temper, kindness to his few close friends, and his philanthropic efforts on behalf of new music. Budiansky also gives a strong sense of Ives as a political crank with his quixotic advocacy of a proposed constitutional amendment limiting Congressional power and providing for a form of direct democracy.
The book also includes broad, penetrating portrayals of Ives' world, including the Danbury of his youth, the Yale University of his college years, the fledgling and scandal-tainted life insurance industry, the continuing influence of spiritualism in American life, and much more. Most importantly, Budiansky develops the influence of 19th Century small town post-Civil War America upon Ives and his music, with its parades, village music, intimacy, religiosity, and, in many ways, egalitarian spirit. For all its audacity, dissonance, and forward-looking character, Ives' music was primarily nostalgic, in Budiansky's account. Ives composed to recreate the Transcendental values of 19th Century New England and the intimacy of an irretrievably lost small town America.
Budiansky describes Ives' music in non-technical accessible terms with some use of particular musical examples. His musical focus is on Ives' "Concord" piano sonata and on the collection of 114 songs that Ives self-published in 1922. A number of the songs receive individual attention. Budiansky also describes in some detail Ives' two famous short orchestral works of 1906, "The Unanswered Question" and "Central Park in the Dark", the Third Symphony, and a small number of other important works. But on the whole, the book does not look closely at specific parts of Ives' large compositional output.
I was taken with this book from its opening pages. It rekindled my interest in Ives and made me want to revisit his music again, particularly his songs, and to explore for the first time some of his music that I don't know. Budiansky portrays Ives vividly as "part genius, part crank, part philanthropic idealist, part everyman American." Readers interested in Ives or in American culture will love this new biography of Charles Ives.
Robin Friedman
