In John Kirkpatrick, American Music, and the Printed Page, Drew Massey examines one of the primary advocates of Charles Ives’s music. Throughout his lifetime, John Kirkpatrick championed Ives’s compositions in work as a performer, editor, writer, and archivist. Massey takes an in-depth look at Kirkpatrick’s editing processes and priorities in dealing with the complexity of Ives’s manuscripts. Along the way, the author also discusses Kirkpatrick’s editorial work with American composers such as Carl Ruggles, Hunter Johnson, and Elliott Carter. With regard to Ives, the author explains the interpretive lens with which Kirkpatrick made his editions, which ultimately had a significant impact on the public’s reception of Ives’s music.
Among his many activities, Kirkpatrick gave the premiere performance and recording of the Concord Sonata, compiled the first major catalogue of Ives’s manuscripts, edited and published Ives’s autobiographical Memos, and was the executive editor of the Charles Ives Society from 1973 to 1985. Over the course of his career, Kirkpatrick’s editorial practices involved not only the musical opinion of the composer, but also that of Kirkpatrick himself. Rather than accepting Ives’s final revisions for the published edition, Kirkpatrick sought to present what he thought were the best revisions for a particular piece. To this end, Kirkpatrick often combined Ives’s different versions for a composition in order to produce the final published edition.
In order to understand the aesthetic priorities that led to Kirkpatrick’s musical decisions, Massey draws on resources including Kirkpatrick’s letters, biographical background, and working copies of Ives editions. The author also gives an account of Kirkpatrick’s first encounter with one of Ives’s works, which was the Concord Sonata. Kirkpatrick came across the sonata while studying in Paris during the late 1920s. Soon after, Kirkpatrick wrote a letter to Ives asking for a copy of the piece, which eventually led to further correspondences with regard to Concord and its related manuscripts. In these letters, Ives expressed sentiments that pointed to the compositional fluidity of the Concord Sonata. Through these communications, “Kirkpatrick began to confront one of the primary questions confronting a performer of the Concord: Does realizing Ives’s intention mean following Ives’s notated score or following through with the license Ives granted in prose?”1
From Kirkpatrick’s perspective, it was his responsibility as an editor to compensate for Ives’s “blind spot in failing to grant his masterpieces certain rights of their own.”2 Kirkpatrick felt that in many cases, Ives’s compositional revisions from the final decades of his life were efforts to update his works for the increasingly modern tastes of the music world. In consequence, Kirkpatrick described that his editions aimed to represent Ives’s compositions from the “point of view of eternity.”3 Massey emphasizes that the musical realizations of this unique editorial approach are best understood on a case-by-case basis, and the book discusses Kirkpatrick’s editorial work for the Concord Sonata, Psalm 54, Forty Earlier Songs, Tone Roads, and Three-Page Sonata, among others.
As well, the author includes chapters on Kirkpatrick’s editing of Carl Ruggles’s Evocations and Mood. Massey also contrasts Kirkpatrick’s approach with the methodology of other Ives editors. Overall, the book elucidates the “imagination and adaptability”4 of John Kirkpatrick’s musicianship, demonstrating his wide-reaching impact on the music of Ives, and moreover, on 20th century American music.
1 p. 81
2 p. 2
3 p. 121
4 p. 156
Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2013