Composers' Voices from Ives to Ellington: An Oral History of American Music. By Vivian Perlis and Libby Van Cleve. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Abstract

This is the inaugural volume of a series of four designed to give a vivid and rounded sense of the vibrant energy that impelled American twentieth-century music. A must-read for anyone who cares about the foundations of that music, Composers' Voices from Ives to Ellington: An Oral History of American Music contains a series of transcriptions from interviews housed at Yale University in their archives of the oral history of American music (OHAM). These interviews were conducted either directly with those composers—Ives, Eubie Blake, Copland, Gershwin, Cowell, Varèse, Ellington, and others—who collectively shaped our nation's music in the first decades of the twentieth century or with others who knew them firsthand. The latter range from persons we might expect (fellow musicians, family members, and business associates) to those who leap from the page as wonderful surprises—for example, Ives's barber! Rarely have five hundred pages of musicological text contained such richness of information combined with such liveliness of presentation. So candid are these interviews, so electric in rhythm, preserving the “jumpiness” of live speech, that it is hard to put the book down.