For nearly forty years, the world of American music has sustained a state of astonishment over its discovery of Charles Ives. That he is America's Greatest Composer and one of the three or four greats of twentieth-century music (along with Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and possibly Bartok or Webern) is generally conceded, yet a fervor still surfaces when his champions announce, as Harold Schonberg did in 1974: “Nobody has had that kind of vision, that personality. … Nobody, nobody ever, and least of all any American composer, has achieved his combination of unorthodoxy, passion, bigness, sweetness and nostalgia.” To characterize his importance, his Americanness, his style, or his place in world and national culture, he is offered to us as the Walt Whitman of American music, our Emerson, our Thoreau, Mark Twain, Melville, Frank Lloyd Wright, Norman Rockwell, James Joyce, our modern Beethoven, “our Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson” rolled into one. The enormous number of performances of Ives's music during the last ten years or so (there are more entries for Ives in recent Schwann and BMI orchestral catalogs than for any other American composer and almost any other modern one) has forced disbelievers to pay attention. When the New York Times “Music” column reported in 1968, under the breathless headline “Suddenly a Flurry of Ives,” that his piano works were being performed at home and abroad, the flurry had scarcely begun. For the Ives Centennial in 1974 and the nation's Bicentennial in 1976 brought even more performances, many recordings, three major Ives festivals, a musical based on his life, conferences, exhibits, and a spate of books—three by scholars with American Studies credentials, one of which was a revisionist biography designed to refute an “Ives Legend.”
A Bibliography of Early Secular American Music-18th Century (Book Review)
