Vivian Perlis’s Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History offers first-hand accounts of the composer through interviews with his family, friends, and musical collaborators. Published in 1974, this primary source book was the first oral history of an American composer. These interviews present insights into topics including Ives’s childhood, musical attitudes, personality, and early performances of his music.
Perlis relates how “the way a composer translates his experience into the work created is elusive, and the relationships between Ives’s life and his music are intricate, subtle, and complex. The interviews exhibited in this book, with those who knew and worked with Charles Ives, cannot explain his music. They can, however, give a clearer picture of this extraordinary man and bring into focus the place and time in which he lived.”1
Ives’s extensive correspondences, friendships, and relations to family members throughout his lifetime provide rich material for Perlis’s oral history. The book is divided into four sections that cover the arc of his life: “Youth and Yale Years,” “Insurance,” “Family, Friends, and Neighbors,” and “Music.”
There are countless musical perspectives that are meaningful for the Ives performer, scholar, and listener. Ives’s nephew, Bigelow, recollects that his uncle wrote the song He Is There! in response to World War I: “He tried to get me to sing it, and if I didn’t sing with enough spirit or gusto, he would land both fists on the piano… There was one little passage which called for a real shout, but I shouted very timidly and he nearly hit the roof. ‘Can’t you shout better than that? That’s the trouble with his country—people are afraid to shout!’”2
The discussions of Ives’s work as an insurance executive reveal a great deal about his role as a mentor to employees. George Hoffman was interviewed in 1969, and discusses how Ives set up educational classes for insurance agents in the 1910s. Hoffman, a supervisor for these classes, described that “Charlie was a humanitarian from the bottom of his heart to his head, and I came away from the first meeting feeling that he was a great philosopher and moralist.”3 Other interviews demonstrate Ives’s generosity to those who worked for him, as well as to his musical collaborators, family members, and charities.
In the early 1940s Charles Ives made several private recordings in New York because he would get letters from performers asking how they should interpret his music. The recording engineer was Mary Howard, and in her interview, she describes these memorable recording sessions. Howard comments that “he knew exactly what he wanted and he got it.”4
There are also interviews with many of the most significant early Ives performers, including conductors Nicolas Slominsky and Bernard Herrmann, pianist John Kirkpatrick, and soprano Mary Bell. Given Ives’s friendships with numerous composers, the book also includes notable interviews with Elliot Carter, Carl Ruggles, and Darius Milhaud, among others.
In addition to the interviews, Vivian Perlis includes countless pictures, ranging from photos of Ives’s birthplace to advertisements from Ives’s insurance company to copies of concert programs and reviews. Through the variety of stories, accounts, and recollections, Charles Ives Remembered gives the reader access to the full scope of the composer’s life.
1 (xix)
2 p. 82
3 p. 56
4 p. 211
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974