Charles E. Ives: Memos

The Memos are a collection of Ives’s previously unpublished writings from the early 1930s onward, compiled and annotated by John Kirkpatrick. Published in 1972, the compilation is organized into three parts: “Pretext,” “Scrapbook,” and “Memories.” Kirkpatrick also includes twenty-one appendices, which range in content from Ives’s responses to Kirkpatrick’s questions on the Concord Sonata, to plans for an operatic libretto in collaboration with his wife, Harmony.

Initially, Charles Ives did not intend these writings for publication, but rather as a way “to answer questions from people who were curious about his music.”1 Kirkpatrick also describes that the Memos were a way for the composer “to get things off his chest in a private way.”2

The Memos began with an imaginary open letter in response to critics’ reviews of the 1931 European performances of his orchestral work, Three Places in New England. The critics commented that Ives’s music was influenced by composers such as Schoenberg and Hindemith. Primarily, Ives wanted to clarify that he had never heard the music of Schoenberg, and that all of his music was written before Hindemith started composing.

The Scrapbook section contains specific information pertaining to dozens of his compositions, including the violin sonatas, symphonies, and works for solo piano. Ives also describes his experience studying music with Horatio Parker at Yale, and his views on the flexible nature of the “fundamental laws”3 of composition that were prescribed in his college courses. With regard to his professor, Ives says, “I had and have great respect and admiration for Parker and most of his music. (It was seldom trivial—his choral works have a dignity and depth that many of [his] contemporaries… did not have).”4

Throughout the Memos, Ives offers invaluable accounts of his father as musical mentor, describing that “what my father did for me was not only in his teaching, on the technical side, etc., but in his influence, his personality, character, open-mindedness, and his remarkable understanding of the ways of a boy’s heart and mind.”5 In particular, he describes the importance of his father’s musical exercises given when he was a boy. One such example: playing and singing folk songs in two different keys at once. In addition, Ives describes his forthright views on musical aesthetics, claiming that it would have been impossible for him to write music for money and maintain his artistic ideals of innovation.

In collecting Ives’s Memos and related writings, Kirkpatrick also included Ives’s own lists of his works, the first of which he wrote on the back of an Ives & Myrick life insurance calendar. These lists are annotated, include various alternate titles, and reveal that many of his church anthems have been lost. As well, the chapter “Chronological Index of Dates” serves as a significant resource for Ives’s positions as a church organist and the performances of his compositions. These examples represent just a few of the wide-ranging primary source materials offered in this book, providing insights into the first-hand perspectives of Charles Ives.

¹ p. 5
² p. 21
³ p. 50
⁴ p. 49
⁵ p. 114-115