Charles Ives Reconsidered

Gayle Sherwood Magee’s Charles Ives Reconsidered presents a comprehensive biography that offers new perspectives on the composer, incorporating significant Ives scholarship of the late 20th century. Published in 2008, Magee references Ives research from the mid-1970s onwards that proposed alternate understandings of the composer’s creative output.

In particular, Magee examines a revised approach to the chronology of Ives’s music, re-assessing his compositional activities of the 1920s. “What emerges from this study is a clearer sense of Ives as a composer, not just a reviser, during the latter decades of his life… This shift requires acknowledging that Ives continued to grow and change as a composer well after 1918, during a time when he was exposed to other musical influences.”¹ In this way, Magee discusses how Ives combined later ideas into his earlier works, reflecting his continual development as a musician.

The book includes perspectives that emphasize the formative influence of Horatio Parker, who was Ives’s teacher at Yale. Furthermore, Magee explores the influence of various intellectual and musical trends from Ives’s lifetime on his compositions.

Magee takes a unique approach to understanding Ives’s life and work in the early 1900s, highlighting the influence of recurring health conditions on his compositional output. In 1906, Ives experienced what was historically referred to as a heart attack. The author explains that the precise medical description of his condition was cardio neurasthenia, which was a severe nervousness affecting the heart. The common treatment in Ives’s time was to go on a rest cure, which included six to twelve weeks of full or partial bed rest in a new environment. Magee then explains how Ives’s rest cure of 1906 served as an important turning point in multiple areas of his life: soon after the rest cure, he co-founded his insurance agency, married Harmony, and entered his most prolific period as a composer.

Later on, Ives’s publishing of his Concord Sonata (1920) and 114 Songs (1922) marked “yet another transformation in his compositional style… Most of his new compositions would be written in an aggressively modernist style.”² Magee links the publishing of these editions to his emergence as a leader and collaborator with other contemporary musicians of the time, including pianist and conductor E. Robert Schmitz, violinist Jerome Goldstein, and composers Henry Cowell and Aaron Copland. While previous scholarship considered the 1920s not to be a creatively productive period, Magee considers Ives’s extensive collaborations, editing, and re-working of his music for performance as significant parts of his compositional activity.

Toward the end of the book, Magee presents a revised chronology of Ives’s works in order to provide “a clearer understanding of how he approached composition at various times in his life”³. Magee’s chronology includes three main periods, with accompanying works and overarching musical aims for each period. At the same time, the author asserts that it is important to accept that Ives’s “most important works cut across the arc of his compositional life in complex and probably unknowable ways.”⁴ Throughout Charles Ives Reconsidered, Magee offers clear frameworks that embrace the composer’s complex life, music, and artistic processes. Moreover, the book demonstrates how all of these factors led to Ives’s remarkable compositional output.

¹ p. 5
² p. 141
³ p. 173
⁴ p. 180