Jan Swafford's colorful biography first unfolds in Ives's Connecticut hometown of Danbury, then follows Ives to Yale and on to his years in New York, where he began his double career as composer and insurance executive. The Charles Ives that emerges from Swafford's story is a precocious, well-trained musician, a brilliant if mercurial thinker about art and life, and an experimenter in the spirit of Edison and the Wright brothers.
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Jan Swafford's colorful biography first unfolds in Ives's Connecticut hometown of Danbury, then follows Ives to Yale and on to his years in New York, where he began his double career as composer and insurance executive. The Charles Ives that emerges from Swafford's story is a precocious, well-trained musician, a brilliant if mercurial thinker about art and life, and an experimenter in the spirit of Edison and the Wright brothers.
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Charles Ives (1874-1954)was the first, and still probably the greatest, composer of a distinctly American art ("classical") music. His relationship to American music seems to me roughly parallel to Walt Whitman's relationship to American poetry and to Charles Peirce's relationship to American philosophy. Like Peirce, Ives was little-known during his lifetime. Furthermore, while many people may be aware of Peirce and of Ives, a much smaller number have much acquaintance with their works.
Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut and remained throughout his life attached to his vision of the post-Civil War small-town New England of his childhood. His father, George Ives, was a bandmaster and the greatest influence on Ives's life. Ives was a musical prodigy who began composing at an early age, quickly picking up experimental styles. He showed great proficiency at the piano and organ. (Through young manhood, he worked Sundays as a church organist.) He studied music at Yale where his teacher was Horatio Parker, a then famous American who was trained in the music of German Romanticism. As a college student, Ives wrote music played for the inauguration of President William McKinley.
After graduation from Yale, Ives became a millionaire in the insurance industry where he pioneered many marketing techniques. He also became increasingly Progressive and politically active and actually proposed a constitutional amendment which would increase the power of the democracy in government decision-making. At the age of 32, he married Harmony Twitchell who, after his father, was the greatest influence on his life.
Ives wrote music in the midst of an extraordinarily busy life. Most people think of Ives as a trailblazer and iconoclast. He was indeed, but may of his earlier works, such as the Second and the Third Symphonies are easily accessible and have a feel of America about them similar to the feelings Aaron Copland evoked some three decades later.
Jan Swafford's biography movingly and eloquently describes the life of Charles Ives. He offers a reflective, thoughtful discussion of Ives, his America, his music, and its reception. In addition to a thorough treatment of Ives' life and works, Swafford has three chapters which he titles "Entra'acets" which consist of broad-based reflections on Ives's music and its significance. Swafford's entire book is full of ideas which are intriguing in themselves. Of Ives's work, Swafford gives his most extended treatment to the Fourth Symphony (he sees Ives as essentially a symphonist) and to the Concord piano Sonata. But many works are discussed in detail which will be accessible to the non-musician. The book has copious and highly substantive footnotes and an extensive bibliography.
Ives's Americanness, humor, romanticism, modernism, optimism, and generosity ( Ives gave large amounts of money to his family and to musicians and music publications. He also paid for the publication of several of his important works when commercial publishers showed no interest in them.) come through well. Swafford sees Ives as the last American transcendentalist in the tradition of Emerson. At the conclusion of his book, Swafford writes of Ives (p. 434)
" [I]n his music and his life he embodied a genuine pluralism, a wholeness beneath diversity, that in itself is a beacon for democracy and its art. Aesthetically he is an alternative to Modernism, an exploratory road without the darkness and despair of the twentieth century. In spirit he handed us a baton and calls on us to carry it further. He suggests a way out of despair, but leaves it to us to find the route for ourselves. If we are alone with ourselves today, Ives speaks incomparably to that condition."
This book made me want to learn more about and to hear the music of Charles Ives. In its own right, it is a joy and an inspiration to read.
