Charles Ives: A Life with Music

Jan Swafford’s biography, Charles Ives: A Life with Music, offers a detailed account of the composer’s life, philosophical perspectives, and musical development. The author’s approach encourages the reader to understand how the numerous aspects of Ives’s life are interconnected with his music. Along these lines, Swafford explains that “this biography tries to be less like a book and more like life; while it does not lack structure, it unfolds like life and at times resembles an improvisation.”¹

Through this “improvisation,” the biography covers themes such as the history of the Ives family in New England, the expansion of Ives’s hometown, Danbury, and father George Ives’s role as a military band leader in the Civil War. Swafford then demonstrates how these factors fostered several aspects of Charles Ives’s childhood. These include his development as an organ prodigy, enthusiasm for musical experimentation, and formation of the philosophical ideals that would later influence his life and music.

Ives believed that composers were able to redeem, remake, and benefit the world through their music. This optimistic perspective, Swafford points out, in part stems from the Romantic-era ideals that he encountered in his studies with Horatio Parker at Yale. Ives described Parker as a decidedly conservative musician who had little influence on him. Nevertheless, the biography conveys that Parker served a crucial role as Ives’s teacher, especially with regard to techniques for symphonic writing. Swafford also discusses in detail Parker’s career as one of the foremost American composers of his era and as a founding faculty member of the Yale School of Music.

Progressing through Ives’s life, the author provides a brief history of the Gilded Age in New York, setting the backdrop for the composer’s entrance into the insurance business. Following his adventurous spirit in music, Ives came up with novel ideas about life insurance practices that would lead to his success as an executive. With regard to his personal life, Swafford includes many excerpts from the personal diary of Ives and his wife, Harmony Twitchell Ives. The author discusses Harmony in great detail: before marrying Ives, she pursued a career as a nurse and held a personal ideology of dedicated service to others. Throughout their lives, Harmony and Charles Ives regularly took in impoverished families, which led to their adoption of daughter Edith Ives.

The biography also examines the reception of Ives’s music and the evolution of its support from performers, audiences, and critics. Swafford notes that the piano music and songs were first to gain a significant following, which happened in the 1920s. The early audiences for Ives’s music included mystics, Marxists, Bohemians, and other related groups. The author comments that “a significant thing about most of these Ivesians was that aside from his own music, Ives had little in common with them.”² In the early 1930s, Ives had successful collaborations with conductor Nicolas Slominsky, who premiered orchestral works such as Three Places in New England, Fourth of July, and Washington’s Birthday. The author also mentions that Aaron Copland was particularly interested in the American folk elements of Ives’s music, perhaps influencing Copland’s later compositions.

In the concluding chapters, “Postlude” and “Editing Ives,” Swafford discusses his own viewpoints on the post-humous performances of Ives’s music and the developments that have been made in performing editions. He also discusses the ideological relevance of Ives in the late 20th century. In his concluding remarks, Swafford identifies this relevance as the following: “In his music and his life he embodied a genuine pluralism, a wholeness beneath diversity, that in itself is a beacon for democracy and its art… In spirit he handed us a baton and calls on us to carry it further.”³

¹ p. xi
² p. 324
³ p. 434