American composer Charles Ives (1874-1954) has gone from being a virtual
unknown to become one of the most respected and lauded composers in
American music. In this sweeping survey of intellectual and musical
history, David C. Paul tells the new story of how Ives's music was
shaped by shifting conceptions of American identity within and outside
of musical culture, charting the changes in the reception of Ives across
the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Paul focuses on
the critics, composers, performers, and scholars whose contributions
were most influential in shaping the critical discourse on Ives, many of
them marquee names of American musical culture themselves, including
Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, and Leonard Bernstein.
Paul explores both how Ives positioned his music amid changing
philosophical and aesthetic currents and how others interpreted his
contributions to American music. Although Ives's initial efforts to find
a public in the early twenties attracted a few devotees, the resurgence
of interest in the American literary past during the thirties made a
concert staple of his "Concord" Sonata, a work dedicated to
nineteenth-century transcendentalist writers. Paul shows how Ives was
subsequently deployed as an icon of American freedom during the early
Cold War period and how he came to be instigated at the head of a line
of "American maverick" composers. Paul also examines why a recent cadre
of scholars has beset the composer with Gilded Age social anxieties.
By embedding Ives' reception within the changing developments of a wide
range of fields including intellectual history, American studies,
literature, musicology, and American politics and society in general,
Charles Ives in the Mirror: American Histories of an Iconic Composer
greatly advances our understanding of Ives and his influence on nearly a
century of American culture.
