Charles Ives: “My Father’s Song”

Charles Ives: “My Father’s Song” is a psychoanalytic biography by Stuart Feder, who was a psychiatrist and music scholar. Feder first encountered the music of Charles Ives in 1950 through Ives collaborator Henry Cowell, who was Feder’s professor at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. The author probes the mental life of Charles Ives to understand the meaning of his music. Throughout the book, Feder details aspects of Ives’s family, upbringing, business life, and marriage to uncover how his relationships shaped his psychology, and ultimately his compositions.

Feder describes that, “Ives’s concept of the reality of music lay somewhere between the animate and the inanimate world, stemming from… his own early development… Music never completely lost this quality, much to the benefit of the imaginative content of his work.”¹

In Ives’s early development, his father George played a significant role in Charles’s musical and psychological formation. Given the significance of George’s influence on Charles, the first section of the book is devoted to reconstructing a biography of George Ives in 19th century America. To his son Charlie, George was larger than life, fostering innovation, instilling discipline, and providing mentorship throughout his childhood.

Feder’s psychoanalytic approach to the relationship between Charles and George offers distinct insights into Charles’s life as a composer. Given the close relationship between father and son, Feder discusses the impact of George’s death on Charles, who was 20 years old at the time. Through psychoanalytic evaluation, the author articulates that “Charlie never quite recovered”² from his father’s passing. When Charles was older, his self-imposed isolation as a composer served as a “prolonged period of mourning,”³ recreating the private musical partnership he experienced with his father during childhood. Later on, Feder proposes that Charles Ives idealized his father as a way of memorializing him, as seen in Ives’s autobiographical Memos.

The biography also discusses Ives’s mother, and the potential significance that there are minimal extant writings about her. In reconstructing Charles’s infancy, Feder describes that she provided a source of stability during this non-verbal stage of development. Feder later goes on to examine how these non-verbal memories translated into musical representation through songs such as The Old Mother and Songs My Mother Taught Me.

Charles’s wife, Harmony, served a fundamental role in the musical and mental life of the composer. Feder explores the relationship between Harmony and her father, Reverend Joseph Twitchell, explaining that “the young girl who had served as a companion on the minister’s speaking engagements had grown up to pursue in fantasy what amounted to a holy collaboration.”⁴ Harmony viewed her partnership with Charles as linked to the creation of his music, and Feder relates the first decade of their marriage as Ives’s most creatively prolific years.

Feder dedicates much of the final chapters to the 114 Songs and Memos, which he explains are both autobiographies, the former expressing his inner-universe through music, and the latter expressing his ideas about the world through prose. Both of these works convey Ives’s own view of his upbringing, college years, and musical collaborations. Furthermore, Feder explains the psychological reasons for Ives’s perspectives and opinions, which include topics such as music, philosophy, politics, and culture. In this way, the biography connects the full range of the composer’s life and work through the distinctive inner and outer worlds of Charles Ives.

¹ p. 356
² p. 134 
³ p. 175
⁴ p. 207