Charles Ives: A Life with Music

The is a superb biography of the remarkable American composer, Charles Ives, with great insight into his music.

What can one say? This book still reigns supreme, years after the barrage of domestic musicological commentary continues to distort and twist Ives's great legacy. Swafford gives us Ives, the man, the composer, the visionary. He does not impose an alternate agenda on this original spirit--who happened also to be one heckuva remarkable humanitarian, thinker, prophet, and generous soul--the likes of whom seldom have been seen before, let alone since.Those pushing the "new Ives" down our throats would do well to look at themselves in the mirror; if they do not feel shame for what they have done, they are incapable of it. Ives is America's national musical treasure, yet he is appreciated less in his homeland than he is in many places abroad--thanks to voracious efforts to equate the man and his music to terms comfortable only to those who have seized the spotlight to promote their own agenda. Are these people ashamed of Ives and what he stood for? If so, are they are afraid of the light of truth, especially of it being shined upon them? They have reduced Ives to a musical mediocrity who only can be seen as damaged goods. In their eyes, it is impossible for a home grown visionary to have preempted their European heroes. And since when did these people get to be judge and jury, other than by their own "admission"?Swafford celebrates Ives as he was, plying his commentary with loving insight. The fact that Swafford has not weighed in again after all these years would tend to imply that he has given up in the face of a relentless crowd who have foisted themselves upon the record, shouting down all who stand in the way of their self-serving efforts to promote their own glory at Ives's expense. Yet Swafford's work stands. He must realize that it will outlive the nonsense being perpetrated today. Anyone who reads it will emerge with a reinvigorated respect and admiration for Ives, in which all of the negative baggage suddenly can be seen for what it is: unsupported, uncorroborated propaganda for an alternative agenda that does not include Ives.Buy this book and know Ives, the composer, the man and the visionary.

Excellent, insightful, highly readable biography. The author know his subject and brings a balanced, historically sensitive approach to it - he does not impose current value judgments on historical figures.

No Problems

Enjoying this book--very well written and clear. Interesting subject, articulate author. Recommend this to anyone with an interest in Ives.

After I got past his childhood It got more interesting. I loved the stories about his fathers musical experimentation with...Brass Bands of the era. The first chapters are dry as toast. It gets better and I found it all very interesting and it helped put Ives into chronological context (for me) with other music I have listebed to by Cowell, Elliot Carter, Copeland, Ruggles, et. al. It may be that so little information is available that only an incomplete picture can be drawn. I don't fault the author for this, Ives was reclusive. I didn't realize what a radical "Progressive" old coot he became. I'll never look at my insurance policy the same again!

Well-written, reseached and presented. This is the biography we'd hoped for and will be the standard for years to come. In depth yet fun to read. Just about perfect.

Quite recently, I had the privilege of reading a copy of this book that was the personal copy of a musician who had been involved, in a rather unique way, in the centennial observation of Charlie Ives's birthday back in 1974. For reasons of geography, then musical interest, he "got to know" Charlie quite well, even if only 20 years after Charlie's death. I immediately ordered my own copy, while continuing to read the heavily-annotated copy of my musician friend. (It was rather vicarious pleasure, "looking over the shoulder" of this musician, to see what it was about the music, life and times of Charlie that fascinated him.)In his early years, Ives was a one-man dynamo. Learning much of his music theory and practice from his father George Ives, who had been a very young (perhaps the youngest) Civil War band leader, and then from Horatio Parker at Yale University, he had more than a "thorough grounding" in the basics. However, unlike most American composers, particularly those of his and the following generation, he did not go to Europe for a post-grad internship with any known European composer, but simply set out on his own after matriculating from Yale. He went to New York City, employed as an insurance clerk for one full-time job, wrote music constantly for another full-time job, and had yet another career, had he wanted it, as organist and choir director for the Central Presbyterian Church in New York. During this period - leading up to his marriage in 1908 - he literally burned the candle at both ends. (Swafford goes on, later in the book, to posit why Charlie had this incredible burst of energy for the first 15 or 20 years of his adult life, but it's best that his reasons for this - and for Ives's shortened composing career - be left to you, the potential reader.)Most anyone who knows anything about Ives knows that he became comfortably wealthy in the insurance industry, that during his active composing days little of his music was played by anyone, and that he was - literally and figuratively - burned out by the time he was only 40. For the remaining half of his life, much of it was spent editing, publishing and promoting his music and the music of others, including many friends, using the proceeds from his insurance success to underwrite projects for many composers who would have gone unnoted had it not been for him. Musical success - unlike business success - came too late in life for him to truly enjoy at least its artistic, if not financial, rewards. He was in his last years when Leonard Bernstein premiered his Second Symphony, and never lived to hear his masterpiece - his Fourth Symphony - premiered by Leopold Stokowski in 1965. Despite this, he was far from an unhappy man in his later years; philosophically resigned yet optimistic that his day might yet come would be the more accurate description.Swafford's writing is simply wonderful. It tells the story of a true American iconoclast; an "original." The narrative flows beautifully without omitting anything of significance in Ives's life or about his music. (The book contains nearly 80 pages of endnotes, in which the musical marginalia are explained in exhaustive, but emminently readable, detail, to preserve the flow of the main narrative.) In parts, it is incredibly moving. I particularly enjoyed the extended "mating dance" of his courting of Harmony Twichell, who was to become his life-long helpmate (and who did live long enough to attend the Stokowski premiere of his masterpiece, as the guest of honor). Ives, ever the Victorian man if something else as a composer, would always refer to her, to third parties, as "Mrs. Ives." Yet their fifty years together could be a model for today's dysfunctional families. A beautiful chapter; one of the best in the book.There's a curiously cryptic endnote that suggests a "what might have been." It is a fact that very little of Ives's music saw public performance before the early 30's, when Nicholas Slonimsky championed Ives and other "moderns." Yet another two decades were to pass until Bernstein premiered the Second Symphony. Yet, in 1910, while shopping in a music store in preparation for his final return to Vienna, where he would die in less than a year's time, Gustav Mahler purchased a fair copy - one of only two or three in existence - of Ives's Third Symphony. Swafford doesn't make that big a deal about this, but I do. I've always thought that Ives and Mahler, aside from being near-contemporaries, had more in common than they did in opposition. It is just conjecture - but truly fascinating conjecture - to think what might have happened had Mahler premiered Ives's Third Symphony at a time in the life of Ives when it really might have made a difference.Just what was Ives, as a composer? Bernstein did him no favors by calling him "a primitive; a Grandma Moses of music" while at the same time championing his music. Back in those days, there were no labels like "atonalist," "serialist," "avant-gardist," "post-modernist," what-have-you, that we tend to use today to compartmentalize a composer. To me, Ives was, well... an iconoclast, an "original," and, if a label must be applied, our first "pre-post-modern." He was never imitated, at least not successfully, not only because he didn't have his own students as did other composers, but because by the time his music enjoyed sufficient - if not plentiful - performances, composers' agendas were different.Fortunately audiences think differently, and do enjoy Charlie's music. And you will enjoy this book.Bob Zeidler

The print is small and not of the best quality; the photos are almost impossible to discern (very dark...). It almost appears as if the pages were Xeroxed from the original publication. As to the content, I have only read the author's preface, but have the feeling the work will be long-winded and perhaps somewhat tedious.