Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music

In Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music, J. Peter Burkholder presents a detailed overview of the philosophical concepts underlying Ives’s compositions. The author demonstrates how Ives’s artistic purposes evolved over the course of his lifetime, culminating in his mature period of work. Furthermore, the book examines Ives’s prose work Essays Before a Sonata as a way of charting the development of the composer’s ideas throughout his career. Through this approach, Burkholder explains that “the diversity between and within Ives’s compositions and the radical changes in style and method at different stages of his career suddenly begin to make sense.”¹

The author provides an aesthetic analysis of Ives’s Essays Before a Sonata, outlining its ideas into three major foundations: “(1) a dualistic approach to issues, (2) a personal and social idealism, and (3) a reliance on personal intuition and experience rather than external authority.”² Ives presents these ideas mainly in the context of 19th century Transcendentalist thinkers, such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne. At the same time, however, Burkholder shows how many of these ideas were supported by other influences in his life, such as his family and education at Yale.

Ives’s father, George, played an important role in shaping the composer’s musical experimentalism and philosophy. As Charles’s music teacher, George combined disciplined compositional technique with new explorations of musical sounds. Here, the young composer learned to rely on his own intuition, which “contributed immeasurably to his later self-reliance”³ as a musician. In addition, Burkholder describes how the Ives family had a generations-long tradition of social justice and religious ethics, which likely shaped Charles’s sense of philosophical idealism. With these notions, the young Ives wrote pieces with a direct purpose for the community, whether they were songs and choral works for church, or marches for the Danbury town band.

The composer’s studies at Yale served as a major turning point in his artistic life. Through formal studies with Horatio Parker, Ives was able to distance himself from the musical traditions of his upbringing. Yale provided greater contact with the European tradition of classical music, allowing the composer to cultivate an individualistic identity that combined various musical styles. After college, Ives turned away from writing music for the public, enabling the artistic freedom to explore new compositional ideas without the scrutiny of an audience. Ives began to write new kinds of “concert pieces that are “about” vernacular styles and vernacular performance, quoting tunes, using familiar ragtime rhythms, and evoking the spirit and atmosphere of performances by amateur musicians.”⁴

Ives continued to forge an original musical vision through his marriage to Harmony Twitchell. Through Harmony’s complete belief in his musical work, along with his separation from the professional music world, Ives could be confident in the importance of his unorthodox ideas. Burkholder describes that Harmony’s artistic inspiration led to a number of foundational ideas that would influence Charles Ives’s “largest, greatest, and most characteristic compositions.”⁵ These ideas included: the musical representation of emotional experiences, the expression of nostalgia, the inclusion of literary subjects in compositions, the development of an American musical identity, and a bolstering of Charles’s philosophical idealism.

Over the course of the book, Burkholder explains the evolution of Ives’s ideas across his lifetime, and how the ideas were realized in his compositions. The author also demonstrates how these musical and philosophical concepts came about from the many influences in Ives’s life. Such an examination presents the music in its full context, allowing listeners, scholars, and performers to further engage with the numerous expressive aims of Charles Ives.

¹ p. 7
² p. 8
³ p. 48
⁴ p. 85
⁵ p. 96