Abstract
Charles Ives’ Decoration Day, a dreamy haze of almost-forgotten memories and half-remembered tunes, depicts recollections American Civil War through the eyes of a Connecticut youth at the end of the nineteenth century. The work, originally published as the second movement of Ives’ New England Holidays Symphony for orchestra, is a musical representation of the composer’s childhood memories of that eponymous holiday.This paper links Ives’ own descriptions of the composition, his childhood, and his memories of the somber annual memorial to the musical gestures in the score, synthesizing extant scholarship with practical analysis and performance experience. Through better understanding Charles’ connections to the Civil War, specifically by way of his father, the bandmaster George Ives, Decoration Day comes to life as a stirring epitaph for a boy’s long-lost hero.
Highlights
Charles Ives’s Decoration Day, a dreamy haze of almostforgotten memories and half-remembered tunes, depicts communal recollections of the American Civil War through the eyes of a Connecticut youth at the end of the 19th century
Beginning with historical contextualization of the work within Ives’s output and the broader perspective of Charles Ives’s own connections to the Civil War by way of his father, the bandmaster George Ives, Decoration Day comes to life as a stirring epitaph for a boy’s long-lost hero
In Ives’s Memos, he described the larger Holidays set as encompassing the four seasons of the year in his youth, “. . . pictures of a boy’s holidays in a country town,” (Ives, 1972, p. 94). It is within those memories, and within Decoration Day, that Ives musically depicted other individuals’ remembrances and feelings associated with the recent American Civil War
Summary
Charles Ives’s Decoration Day, a dreamy haze of almostforgotten memories and half-remembered tunes, depicts communal recollections of the American Civil War through the eyes of a Connecticut youth at the end of the 19th century. Published as the second movement of Ives’s New England Holidays Symphony for orchestra, Decoration Day is a musical representation of the composer’s childhood memories of that eponymous holiday.
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