In Charles Ives and His Music (1955), Henry and Sidney Cowell write a compelling account of Charles Ives’s life and creative ideals. Overall, the Cowells illustrate the principles underlying Ives’s music, and its progress toward public and critical acceptance. The second half of the book offers detailed discussions of Ives’s compositional style, examining his approach to musical elements such as polyphony, harmony, melody, and rhythm.
This was the first biography written about Charles Ives, published one year after his death. The book draws on Ives’s autobiographical manuscripts, as well as his published essays. The authors’ perspective reflects their friendship with Ives, presenting a personal understanding of his family life, career as an insurance executive, and pursuits as a composer.
Cowell refers to Ives as the “father of American music”1 because he was the first composer who questioned the value of European culture for American composition. In this way, Ives set the precedent for “the grammar of a new symphonic speech.”2 By the 1950s, the influence of his musical style could be heard not only in the concert hall, but also in music for film and Broadway.
Ives’s musical innovations were rooted in both the popular folk music of his youth and the high-minded ideals of Transcendentalist thinkers such as Emerson and Thoreau. While Ives’s influences, ideas, and musical language may at first seem contradictory, Cowell explains the meaning of such paradoxes: “he believes that full expression of the opposing aspects of any idea whatever is a necessary step on the way to perfect truth.”3
The composer carried his philosophical ideals over into the business of life insurance. In Ives’s manual The Amount to Carry — Measuring the Prospect, Cowell includes quotations that encourage salesman to appeal to the “strength of the average mind”4 and contribute to the “progress of the greater life values.”5 Such passages parallel Ives’s exploration of new musical possibilities in his composition.
The biography covers in detail the musical influence of his father, George, Ives’s studies at Yale, and the challenges he faced because of his experimental and highly original compositions. Later on in his life, Ives’s declining health led him to retire from the insurance business and stop composing. Cowell also highlights fascinating early performances that initiated the success of Ives’s music. These include the 1920 premiere of the Concord Sonata in New Orleans, the first European performances of Three Places in New England in the early 1930s, for which Anton Webern conducted the Vienna premiere, and the 1951 performance of the Second Symphony with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic.
Charles Ives did not attend the performance of his Second Symphony in 1951, for fear that he would be upset by the way it would be performed. He did, however, listen to the radio broadcast, and Cowell describes that “Ives did venture downstairs to listen to it on the maid’s little radio in the kitchen… he emerged from the kitchen doing an awkward little jig of pleasure and vindication.”6
Charles Ives was an early visionary of American music. The Cowell biography not only demonstrates the thoughtful individual behind this vision, but also the journey of these compositions into the world.
1 p. 4
2 p. 5
3 p. 142
4 p. 56
5 p. 56
6 p. 136
New York: Oxford University Press, 1955