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This chapter discusses Charles Ives and his relationship to ragtime, which was the leading popular music at the beginning of the twentieth century. Ives is a composer who was at the center of the canon of American music, and in his Four Ragtime Dances, he bargains the tensions between European and American music. The chapter shows that his early experiments with ragtime represent one of his initial attempts to create a distinctly American music. It also tries to explain what ragtime represents, and identifies the type/s of music Ives believed to best represent America.

This chapter examines the impact of musicology on Charles E. Ives's reception by focusing on the contributions made by musicologists to discourse about the composer during the period 1965–1985. It considers how musicologists portrayed Ives through their disciplinary practices and perceptions and shows that their image of Ives was deeply rooted in European music history. The chapter also explores how Ives became the subject of style history by looking at the work of William W. Austin, H. Wiley Hitchcock, and Robert Morgan. Finally, it discusses J. Peter Burkholder's discovery that Ives's commitment to transcendentalism was not so deep nor did it extend quite so far back as had previously been assumed.

This chapter examines how Charles E. Ives emerged as a Cold War icon, and more specifically as a champion of the liberating powers of individualism, during the period 1947–1965. It begins with a discussion of Lou Harrison's role in pushing Ives from the modernist peripheries of the American musical world toward its center, and in helping the composer win the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. It then considers how Ives and his music were drawn into a discussion about the nature of freedom against the backdrop of the Cold War. In particular, it explores how Ives's music was programmed on concerts designed to promote the artistic products of “cultural freedom,” citing the presentation of his work at an arts festival in Paris that was held under the auspices of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. It also looks at Henry Cowell's book Charles Ives and His Music, written in collaboration with his wife Sidney, and concludes with an assessment of Ives's musical legacy as a function of his commitment to transcendentalism.

This chapter examines how Charles E. Ives has been affected by the transformations in American musicology over the last twenty-five years. It begins with a discussion of Maynard Solomon's accusation that Ives had engaged in a “systematic pattern of falsification” to safeguard his claims at the patent-house of musical modernism. It then considers how Solomon's criticisms served as the catalyst for an explosion of scholarly activity centered on Ives in the 1990s. In particular, it describes the approaches taken by musicologists to rebut Solomon, including those associated with “New Musicology.” It also explores the etiology of the myth that Ives was a patriarch of a lineage of composers known as the American Mavericks, along with the vicissitudes of Ives scholarship at the turn of the twentieth century.

Ives first conceived the Concord Sonata while on vacation at Elk’s Lake in 1911, based in part on pieces he had already been working on. He claimed to have been able to play the piece by 1915, though it wasn’t written out in publishable form until 1919. After publication he came to regret having simplified the piece somewhat, and he continued tinkering with it until a second edition finally appeared in 1947. This extraordinarily long gestation period creates unusual textual problems for performers of the work.

This chapter examines the contributions made by “bright young academicians” to discourse about Charles E. Ives during the period 1965–1985. More specifically, it considers the impact that historians who worked under the “American Studies” rubric had on Ives's reception. The chapter first provides an overview of the 1965 premiere of Ives's Fourth Symphony before discussing the 1974 centenary celebrations of his birth. It then explores the convergence of Cold War politics and Ives's reception, along with the structure and assumptions of the field of intellectual history and its connection to American Studies. It also analyzes Ives's influence on American Studies and intellectual history and describes an approach that calls for a rethinking of America and of history “from the bottom up.” The chapter concludes with an assessment of Ives's prospects in American Studies in the late 1970s.

The sinking of the Lusitania and the subsequent shift in the United States from neutrality toward participation in World War I affected Charles Ives in both his music and his business as a life insurance executive. The tragedy’s effect on the insurance industry was far-reaching, and government proposals to supply insurance to soldiers were initially resisted. As an artist, Ives sided with the soldier as “everyman” in his war songs and in his use of the hymn “In the Sweet Bye and Bye” in “From Hanover Square North” and “The Things Our Fathers Loved.” Ives’s insurance firm suffered financial losses initially but then supported engagement, participating fully and generously in public initiatives like the Liberty Loan campaigns.

This chapter focuses on Charles E. Ives's self-promotional activities during the period from 1921 to 1934. Its point of departure is an analysis of Essays Before a Sonata, published by Ives as a prose prolegomenon to his Piano Sonata No. 2, “Concord, Mass., 1840–60” in 1920. The chapter begins with a discussion of the literary context of Essays Before a Sonata and the inspirations for “Concord” Sonata. It then considers Ives's involvement with the Franco-American Society as well as his ambition in planning and executing the distribution of Essays, the “Concord” Sonata, and 114 Songs. It also examines how Ives staked his claim as the inventor of musical techniques that were on the cutting edge of musical modernism as opposed to transcendentalism. Finally, it concludes with an assessment of the unpublished autobiographical Memos.

After the musical canon became established in the Gilded Age, the status quo in American music persisted well into the second decade of the twentieth century. George Chadwick, Amy Beach, Horatio Parker, and many other late romantic composers remained active and maintained much of their styles. Before 1915 two American composers, Charles Ives and Leo Ornstein, were writing unusual and original music. Despite their completely different backgrounds, career tracks, and historical reputations, both men arrived at musical positions that were remarkably similar and endured comparable problems. Both also wrote programmatic music in the broadest sense. In January and February 1915, Ornstein gave a series of four concerts at the Bandbox Theatre in New York City, by far the most significant event in his American performing career. His most uncompromising foray into modernism was the Violin Sonata, Op. 31. For Ives, his Concord Sonata was a bold move that established his name before the musical world. This chapter focuses on the lives and musical careers of Ornstein and Ives.

This chapter focuses on Henry Cowell's advocacy of Charles E. Ives and his music between the years 1927 and 1947. Cowell's ideas about Ives can be grouped into two periods: those produced prior to the sentence he served at San Quentin State Prison for a 1936 conviction on a morals charge, and those produced after his release in 1940. This chapter first considers Cowell's portrait of Ives as a New England musical ethnographer before discussing the views of anthropologists, folklorists, and musical modernists about folk music. It then examines how Cowell became interested in folk music, along with his influence on Ives. It also looks at the notion of a usable past, advanced by Van Wyck Brooks in his essay “On Creating a Usable Past,” in which he called for a rewriting of the history of American literature. The chapter concludes with an assessment of Ives's “Concord” Sonata and Ives's commitment to freedom (in the sense of refusing to impose a fixed final form on his works).

With America's entrance into the Great War in April 1917, the role of art and music in society understandably took on a new urgency, so that an assessment at the beginning of 1918 by Walter Spalding, called “The War in its Relation to American Music,” was timely as well as predictable. No composer or resident on the eastern seaboard was held in higher esteem during the years of the Great War than John Alden Carpenter. Through the period of the Great War, hardly any American critic argued that a composer might look outward to the recent and invigorating models of the European avant-garde. One of America's most daring composers during the war was Leo Ornstein. Of all those who were composing at this time, no figure provided more vivid testimony to the possibility of a truly American avant-garde than Charles Ives.

This chapter structures its narrative around a sales pitch written by the composer and insurance agent Charles Ives. Ives’ pitch used the science of traditional life insurance prediction to win over possible applicants and also tried to convince applicants that their financial and biological lives could be understood through probability. Most importantly, Ives explained his method in terms of offering a scientific method for valuing a life. In counterpoint to Ives’ pitch, the chapter offers two variations on the theme of valuing lives in 1920s America. One centers on Oscar Rogers and New-York Life’s championing of the numerical method for valuing individual lives in terms of risk factors. It explains the system, but also the doubts that actuaries and medical directors fostered about it, were it ever used outside of life insurance (as eventually occurred through the efforts of the Life Extension Institute). The second variation follows Louis Dublin and Alfred J. Lotka as they construct a means for valuing lives in dollars and debate the possibility of using those values to justify public health interventions. Eventually as their values became popular, the two men backed away from using them outside the context of valuing a man to his family.

This chapter provides a biography of Charles Ives and his works as a musician. Charles Edward Ives was an American modernist composer. He was one of the first American composers of international renown, though Ives' music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. The Philharmonic's association with Ives dates from 1951, when Leonard Bernstein led the première of the Second Symphony, composed between 1897 and 1909. The time lag was typical for Ives, who withdrew from the musical profession in 1902, after the première of his very respectable cantata The Celestial Country at the Central Presbyterian Church in New York, where he had been working as organist and choirmaster. He traded this fairly high prestige job for a lowlier one as an actuary with the Mutual Insurance Company. By 1906 he and a partner, Julian Myrick, were in business for themselves, and soon Ives & Myrick became the most successful insurance company in America.

In 1911 Charles Ives wrote “The New River,” a song unique among his works for its outspoken environmentalist stance. Composed in direct response to the diversion of waters from Ives's beloved Housatonic River to feed New York City reservoirs and plans for constructing a dam, the song also captured widespread national outrage over the Hetch Hetchy Dam being built at the same time through Yosemite National Park. Combining transcendentalist understandings of nature with more contemporary arguments to save Hetch Hetchy published by Robert Underwood Johnson and John Muir, Ives's song sounds his belief “the fabric of life weaves itself whole.”

This chapter focuses on Charles Ives's legendary “Universe” Symphony, a performing version of which has been produced by composer Larry Austin, with the help of the College–Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati—the Cincinnati Philharmonia and the C.C.M. Percussion Ensemble. The “Universe” Symphony contains three sections or movements played without pause or significant variation in tempo. The first section relates to the past which includes the formation of water and mountains, the second section relates to the present which includes the formation of earth and evolution in nature and humanity, whereas the third section is about the future which is related to heaven and the rise of all to the spiritual. This symphony is directly in the line of European symphonic transcendentalism and evokes sensations of unfathomable or ungraspable space because of the use of indefinite, long-held tones or spiraling figures at the threshold of audibility.

Historical moments in which music consciously identifies American religious experience provide the historical framework of this introductory chapter, which stretches from William Billings's “America” to “Amazing Grace” as a historical text to the ethnographic present in Pentecostal worship in a Chicago Romanian church. The theoretical concepts that connect the book's chapters are introduced, including concepts of genealogy, individualism, and the metaphors of American religion in sacred music-making. Charles Ives and Thomas A. Dorsey Jr, the great American modernist composer and the inventor of the gospel blues, provide case studies. The interdisciplinarity of the book's diverse contributors is introduced and connected to the chapters that follow. The importance of music as ritual, sacred language, and the performance of sacred space generates further links and shared notions of religious experience for the book's chapters.

This chapter discusses the views of American composers on the national character of music in America, and the development of nationalism in American music. Since about the mid-1920s American composers had been advocating that it was time for American music to “come of age,” and the cultivation of a new form of music with American character was a major concern. Charles Ives was very much involved in developing the American character in music and his music is larded with folksong including hymns, patriotic anthems, marches, and the like. Roy Harris insisted on the American style and content of his music. The employment of folksong is, of course, no guarantee that a national character will be embodied in the music. What is required if a truly national character is to be achieved is that the entire texture be impregnated with what we recognize as indigenous to the compiled material. If a certain manner of exploitation of rhythmic devices is to be taken as a distinguishing feature of American music, it is inevitable to assume that it must have a great deal to do with jazz, pop, and rock. There are elements other than those provided by folk music that define the American character, elements along the lines of immobility, but it is not too clear what they are. There are some things, for example, Henry Cowell's tone clusters, more concrete things that serious American music has contributed to the whole world, though it would be hard to identify them as American unless their geneology was known.