Charles Ives in the Mirror: American Histories of an Iconic Composer

David C. Paul’s Charles Ives in the Mirror: American Histories of an Iconic Composer examines the ways in which scholars, critics, performers, and the public have understood Charles Ives. Published in 2013, the author discusses the development of ideas about Ives, from the composer’s lifetime through the beginning of the 21st century. In this way, Paul explores the many viewpoints of Ives that have come from a diverse group of communities, ranging from “the bohemian enclaves of the Bay Area to the most prestigious concert halls of the United States, from the makeshift offices of a New Orleans arts magazine to the lecture halls and libraries of Ivy League universities.”¹

Paul emphasizes that Ives’s life and music are deeply connected to American identity. Nevertheless, the composer has evoked wide-ranging narratives about what it means to be American. “Already by the late fifties, Ives had been variously portrayed as an American pioneer of musical modernism, an ethnographically inclined composer who had discovered the richness of American folk music, and a symbol of American freedom.”²

Moreover, Paul describes that studying Ives is not only significant for the history of American music, but also for American history: “The history of Ives’s reception is not simply a series of portraits of an unusual composer, it is also a series of mirrors that reflect the way Americans have viewed themselves. It is the restive, fractured story of nation in miniature.”³

The first chapter considers the early reception of Ives, from 1921 to 1934. In 1921, Ives mailed his self-published Concord Sonata, with its accompanying prose work Essays Before a Sonata, to hundreds of households. The composer intended to foster an audience for his music, integrating the philosophies of Emerson, Thoreau, and other Transcendentalist thinkers with his music. In turn, Paul discusses how these transcendentalist writings formed key points of reference in debates “about the nature and direction of American Society”⁴ during the 1910s. In consequence, the author shows how Ivesians of the 1920s appreciated the composer’s music as part of a larger social context: Emerson and Thoreau served as a link between Ives’s music and American culture at large.

Paul goes on to analyze the historical context surrounding Ives’s rise in popularity over the course of the 20th century. This includes the role of composer Henry Cowell as an Ives advocate, the changing image of Ives’s music during the Cold War, and the expansion of Ives scholarship in American universities. The author also discusses John Kirkpatrick’s cataloging of Charles Ives’s manuscripts in the 1950s, which formed the Ives archives at Yale University. As well, Paul discusses the advent of “New Musicology,” which fostered a highly interdisciplinary approach to academic research on Ives in the second half of the twentieth century.

Another interesting discussion covers how champions of Ives’s major symphonic works emphasized different aspects of his music. In the late 1950s, Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic toured Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In the context of the Cold War, Bernstein described Ives’s music to journalists as representative of “American freedom of expression in art.”⁵ In 1965, Leopold Stokowski premiered Ives’s Fourth Symphony in New York. Here, the conductor highlighted Ives’s role as a revolutionary through the use of innovative musical techniques. In this discourse, Paul demonstrates how the early performances of these major works were influenced by factors such as politics, the media, and the concert-going public.

Charles Ives in the Mirror demonstrates how the many interpretations of Ives – from musical, to cultural, to scholarly – have arisen over the course of the 20th and early 21st centuries. These numerous viewpoints are connected to the fact that Ives’s work has interested, and continues to interest, a diverse array of musical communities. Through this book, Paul expresses how those musical communities serve as the link between the richness of Ives’s reception and the richness of Ives’s music.

¹ p. 5
² p. 2
³ p. 2
⁴ p. 17
⁵ p. 103