Questions and Veracities: Reassessing the Chronology of Ives's Choral Works

Abstract

purpose of this article is to introduce and address problems of chronology of Ives's music and to propose an objective method for redating it. In order to do so, it is necessary first to understand origin of most scholarship on Ives, including that on chronology of his works. In his autobiographical writings Essays before a Sonata (1920), postface to 114 Songs (1922), and Memos (begun 1931), created a self-portrait that was expanded by scholars after his death, beginning with Henry and Sidney Cowell's authoritative biography, Charles and His Music. results were collectively dubbed Ives by Frank Rossiter in his 1975 study, Charles and His America, 1 and its outlines are familiar: isolated genius largely self-taught, a businessman rather than a professional musician, tied to no schools and refusing to propagandize his own music,2 whose experimental works were composed significantly earlier than pieces by European contemporaries exhibiting similar approaches. Until quite recently, legend virtually dictated Ives's role in twentieth-century music history This image of as Yankee pioneer has been reassessed from various angles, beginning with Rossiter's study and Victor Fell Yellin's 1974 review of Harold Farberman's recording of Ives's cantata Celestial Country.3 Rossiter identified origins, purposes, and limitations of legend and its potential to obscure the truth about [Ives's] creative life.4 Yellin examined influence on Ives's work of his teacher at Yale, Horatio Parker (1863-1919), as well as Ives's compositional attitude and abilities after his graduation in 1898. His placement in historical context continued with Robert P. Morgan's 1978 article, Ives and Mahler: Mutual Responses at End of an Era, and J. Peter Burkholder's two studies, his 1983 dissertation The Evolution of Charles Ives's Music, and 1985 book, Charles Ives: Ideas behind Music. These studies reconnected Ives's music to European tradition through analyses of form and procedure.5