Children of the Fire: Charles Ives on Emerson and Art

Abstract

THE IMPACT of the Transcendental writers upon Charles Ives has long been acknowledged in passing but seldom recognized as a pervasive element in his compositions or, indeed, as the ground of his whole view of musical expression. Ives himself is not responsible for this oversight, for in conversation, interviews, and published writings he repeatedly identified Emerson and Thoreau as his intellectual forebears; many writers, however, have regarded the Concord tradition as simply one among the innumerable components of his highly idiosyncratic music.1 list of titles which refer explicitly to this tradition is imposing: one song based upon an Emersonian text (Duty) and another entitled Thoreau; an Emerson piano concerto (unfinished); the Second Pianoforte Sonata, subtitled Concord, Mass., i840-i860, with four movements called, respectively, Emerson, Hawthorne, The Alcotts, and Thoreau; and the book-length Essays Before a Sonata, designed to accompany the previous work. prose Essays, Ives's most extensive statement of his musical principles and, consequently, the starting-point for this article, is in effect a defense of the Transcendental attitude toward art as Ives interpreted it and applied it to his music. Not only does it reveal the extent of Ives's indebtedness to his fellow New Englanders, but it suggests that Ivesian musical techniques often suspected of being mere jokes or aberrations are actually carefully calculated pro-