Charles Ives: A Life with Music

by Jan Swafford

Book Overview

This work provides a biography of Charles Ives, an important 20th-century classical composer. The author continually returns to Ives's own writings and papers to help the reader gain an insight into... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393317196
• ISBN13: 9780393317190
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 544 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Captivating Biography

This is a captivating biography by an author who treats Ives' music, life and times with great skill and respect. Ives was neither a struggling musician nor a political radical, but a full member of the American middle class. He majored in music at Yale and then became a successful co-owner of a New York life insurance agency. He created music without commissions or patrons. His musical creations were personal expressions, with a conviction and an aesthetic all his own. His modernism was uniquely American relying on the sounds and memories of his youth in Danbury, Connecticut. This is a comprehensive biography of a remarkable man.

A Great American Composer Brought to Life

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, we 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 inaugaration of President William McKinley.After graduation from Yale, Ives became a millionare in the insurance industry where he pioneered many marketing techniques. He also became increasingly Progessive 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. This is 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

Ives, the Bucky Fuller of American music!

Charlie Ives was a visionary, an idealist, and apparently a manic-depressive. Swafford tells his story in a compulsively readable fashion, and wins you over to the side of the irascible composer. Ives never made any money from his music, in fact he subsidized it with the fortune he made in the insurance industry. But he was generous in supporting the work of other sympathetic composers as well, including Henry Cowell. Ives was rare in that he was a genius not only in music, but in business. Ives made a fortune in developing the modern, mass-market life insurance industry. He wrote a tremendously influential pamphlet in 1910, "The Amount to Carry," which pioneered estate planning. Ives was an idealist and an altruist even as he became wealthy -- he convinced himself that insurance was socially progressive, and motivated his sales staff with his lofty vision of cooperation. Later in life, he developed this into a plan for a People's World Union! Ives' great successes all came together, early in life, following his marriage. He composed on the side as he built his company, burning the candle at both ends. Swafford speculates that Ives was literally manic during those heroic years of the Teens, and that he subsequently crashed, enduring more depression than mania for the rest of his life. Interestingly, the Great War was such a blow to his idealism, he reacted physically, compounding his collapse. Ives retired very young, but rather than turn to composing, he found that he was unable. The rest of his life was devoted to trying to find an audience for the works of his glory years. I found the book most interesting here, in situating Ives in relation to the more well-known Modernists of his time -- Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Varese and the others. The irony is that while Ives' music came about independently, it was "popularized," only through association with the European revolutionaries, and so he was widely perceived as an imitator. The world was only ready for Charlie's music after the ground had been broken! The story of Cowell, Slonimsky, Carter, Gilman and Bernstein, who championed Ives over many years until he was finally recognized, is fascinating. This is supremely enjoyable reading. Jan Swafford clearly loves Ives, and I found his account irresistable.

A high-water mark in musical biographies.

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 beautiful

Great combination of erudition and accessibility

Not being a music professional, I was pleasantly surprised to find this book not only made Ives come to life but explained the music in a way that neither addressed the lowest common denominator nor spoke exclusively to the ivory tower crowd. The love letters between Ives and his wife Harmony (yes, that really is her name) are incredibly moving for an insurance exec. Saw a good review in Newsweek; agree with its assessment: "one of the best biographies in recent years."