From American Ethnographer to Cold War Icon: Charles Ives through the Eyes of Henry and Sidney Cowell

Scholars have recognized that Henry Cowell was one of the most ardent promoters of Charles Ives, but the fact that Cowell's conception of Ives shifted over time has been overlooked. During the late twenties, Cowell portrayed Ives as a fundamentally social artist with the sensibilities of a musical ethnographer. By the fifties, in the writings Cowell coauthored with his wife Sidney, Ives came to be depicted as a paragon for the liberating power of individualism. Close scrutiny of Cowell's published writings, along with letters and manuscripts from the Henry Cowell Collection of the Music Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, reveals the factors that influenced this transition. Béla Bartók's theories about folk music authenticity were the impetus behind Cowell's earliest conception of Ives. Cowell maintained that Ives had created a definitively American art music by transcribing the performance idiosyncrasies of American folk musicians. The anxieties of the Cold War and a writing partnership with his wife caused Cowell to stress Ives's commitment to the individualism espoused by transcendentalist philosophers. The Cowells no longer equated Ives's Americanness with his ability to transcribe local practice, but instead with his solitary pursuit of the “Universal Mind.”