Evolution and the New World Vision in the Music of Charles Ives

Abstract

‘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.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.