Charles Ives in the Mirror

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Paul
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
American Music ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Aaron Copland ◽  
Leonard Bernstein ◽  
Charles Ives ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Elliott Carter ◽  
Henry Cowell ◽  
Social Anxieties

This book, a sweeping survey of intellectual and musical history, tells the new story of how the music of American composer Charles E. Ives (1874–1954) was shaped by shifting conceptions of American identity within and outside of musical culture. The book focuses on the critics, composers, performers, and scholars whose contributions were most influential in shaping the critical discourse on Ives, many of them marquee names of American musical culture themselves, including Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, and Leonard Bernstein. The book explores both how Ives positioned his music amid changing philosophical and aesthetic currents and how others interpreted his contributions to American music. Although Ives's initial efforts to find a public in the early 1920s attracted a few devotees, the resurgence of interest in the American literary past during the 1930s made a concert staple of his “Concord” Sonata, a work dedicated to nineteenth-century transcendentalist writers. The book shows how Ives was subsequently deployed as an icon of American freedom during the early Cold War period and how he came to be instigated at the head of a line of “American maverick” composers. It also examines why a recent cadre of scholars has beset the composer with Gilded Age social anxieties.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Paul
Keyword(s):  
Aaron Copland ◽  
Leonard Bernstein ◽  
Elliott Carter ◽  
Henry Cowell ◽  
American Composer ◽  
History Of ◽  
Musical Modernism ◽  
The Way

This book explores the changing images of American composer and music icon Charles E. Ives across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, paying particular attention to issues of agency (how an idea transfers from one person to another) and constituency (the nature and size of the audience to which a person speaks). Ives has been, at various times, considered a hero, victim, villain—sometimes singly, sometimes simultaneously. He had been portrayed, for example, as a pioneer of American musical modernism and a symbol of American freedom, but at the same time the perpetrator of one of the greatest musical hoaxes of all times. This book examines the way Ives has been imagined by the critics, composers, performers, and scholars who have had the most impact in shaping the various conversations about him, from Leonard Bernstein and Henry Cowell to Aaron Copland and Elliott Carter. It argues that the history of Ives's reception is not only a series of portraits of an unusual composer, but also a series of mirrors that reflect the way Americans have viewed themselves.

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

2006 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID C. PAUL
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
American Art ◽  
Public Library ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Charles Ives ◽  
New York Public Library ◽  
Henry Cowell ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract 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.”

Opera

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Wierzbicki
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Aaron Copland ◽  
Leonard Bernstein ◽  
American Composers ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The World ◽  
Culture Of Fear ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter analyzes the two most celebrated American composers of “serious” music, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, whose music today is still most regularly programmed not just in the United States but around the world. Not widely known during the homophobic Fifties is the now well-documented fact that Copland and Bernstein were closeted gays. Much publicized at the time, on the other hand, was the non-secret that Copland and Bernstein, along with numerous less-stellar composers, held decidedly left-leaning political views. Likely not just by coincidence, then, both Copland and Bernstein in the mid-1950s produced operas that, in a general way, critically comment on anticommunist red-baiting and the Cold War culture of fear. These operas are Copland's 1954 The Tender Land and Bernstein's 1956 Candide.

Mirror to an Age: Musical America, 1918–30

1990 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 137-147
Author(s):  
Mary Herron DuPree
Keyword(s):  
Stock Market ◽  
First World War ◽  
American Music ◽  
Aaron Copland ◽  
World War ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Stock Market Crash ◽  
The Real ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

The time between the end of the First World War in 1918 and the stock market crash in 1929 has traditionally been considered an interregnum in American Music: before it, American music and musical culture largely reflected that of Europe, and after it, America found its voice in the distinctive compositions of Aaron Copland, Roy Harris and others. An examination of periodical writings on music from that time, however, reveals that this period marked not a state of anticipation but the real beginning of modern American music, of composition of international significance, and of distinctive styles of American composition. It was a period when traditionalism, modernism and jazz-influenced composition were each passionately defended and condemned not only in the music journals but in the pages of most of the general intellectual magazines.

Carlos Chávez’s Polysemic Style:

2015 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonora Saavedra
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Aaron Copland ◽  
Edgard Varese ◽  
Henry Cowell ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way ◽  
At Home

The critical discourse on Carlos Chávez’s music is full of contradictions regarding the presence within it of signifiers of the Mexican, the pre-Columbian, and the indigenous. Between 1918 and 1928 Chávez in fact developed, from stylistic preferences that appeared early in his compositions, a polysemic language that he could use equally well to address the very modern or the primitive, the pre-Columbian or the contemporary mestizo, in and only in those works in which he chose to do so. Chávez’s referents emerged in dialogue with the cultural and political contexts in which he worked, those of post-revolutionary Mexico and modern New York. But he was attracted above all to modernism and modernity, and was impacted by cosmopolitan forces at home and abroad. By the end of the decade he had earned a position within the modern musical field’s network of social relations, and had drawn the attention of agents of recognition such as Edgard Varèse, Paul Rosenfeld, Aaron Copland, and Henry Cowell. These composers and critics added Chávez’s constructed difference to their much-sought collective difference as Americans within a European art. Chávez’s own use of explicit Mexican referents in some of his works shaped the early reception of his music as quintessentially American/Mexican, eventually influencing the way we understand it today.

Carter, Elliott (Cook Jr.) (1908–2012)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brenda Ravenscroft
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
Charles Ives ◽  
Harvard College ◽  
Elliott Carter ◽  
Gustav Holst ◽  
Nadia Boulanger ◽  
Walter Piston

Born in 1908 into a wealthy New York City family, Elliott Carter enjoyed a cosmopolitan childhood, spending time in Europe and learning French at an early age. The composer Charles Ives mentored the young Carter, taking him to concerts in New York and encouraging his developing interest in music. Carter’s childhood, characterized by immersion in a culturally enriched environment and exposure to the modern world, provided the elements from which his artistic aesthetic and musical language would later be forged. When Carter entered Harvard College, he focused his studies on English literature, Greek, and philosophy, although musical activities continued in the form of lessons with Walter Piston and Gustav Holst, as well as singing with the Harvard Glee Club. Carter completed a master’s degree in music at Harvard in 1932, after which he moved to Paris to study composition with Nadia Boulanger for three years. He received a doctorate in music from the École Normale de Musique in Paris in 1935.

Beat and Square Cold War Encounters

2019 ◽  
pp. 317-371
Author(s):  
W. Anthony Sheppard
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
American Composers ◽  
Henry Cowell ◽  
Duke Ellington ◽  
Japanese Music ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Lou Harrison ◽  
Toru Takemitsu

This chapter is focused on the transnational influences of Japanese music during the Cold War and on music’s role in U.S. cultural diplomacy efforts aimed at Japan. This includes examples of numerous American jazz musicians (David Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Herbie Mann) who were sent to Japan and who created musical “impressions” of their experience. A primary focus in on the 1961 Tokyo East-West Music Encounter organized by Nicolas Nabokov and attended by multiple American composers (Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell, Colin McPhee) and scholars (Robert Garfias). The chapter then details the broad influence of gagaku on European (Messiaen, Stockhausen, Xenakis) and American composers, focusing particularly on Alan Hovhaness. Experimental composers, such as Richard Teitelbaum, inspired by John Cage’s engagement with Zen also turned toward Japan. The chapter concludes with an extended discussion of the role of Japanese music and Japanese composers (particularly Toru Takemitsu) in the career of Roger Reynolds.

Carl Ruggles: Two Early Works and ‘Sun-Treader’

Tempo ◽  
1980 ◽  
pp. 3-12
Author(s):  
David Babcock
Keyword(s):  
American Association ◽  
New Music ◽  
Charles Ives ◽  
Henry Cowell ◽  
American Counterpart ◽  
Pan American ◽  
Close Friendship ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Active Membership

In his excellent book Charles Ives and His America (Victor Gollancz Ltd., London, 1976) Frank R. Rossiter presents the most thorough psychosociological study yet made of the life and times of this frequently misunderstood composer—dismissed as a hack by many, elevated to cult figure status by others, realistically appraised by comparatively few. Several chapters examine Ives's personal and musical relationships with other advanced composers working in America during his lifetime. Though he had virtually stopped composing by the 1920's and early 30's, Ives helped finance concerts for the Pan American Association of Composers—whose more active membership included Edgar Varèse, Wallingford Riegger, Henry Cowell, and Carl Ruggles—and the publication of much of their music in Cowell's New Music edition. Thus he became acquainted with these composers, in whose work is found ‘the American counterpart to the rich experimentalism of the Viennese school’. His relationship with them ranged from bitter antagonism (of Varèse) to close friendship (with Cowell and Ruggles). Before the recent ‘complete’ recording of his music, Ruggles remained comparatively unknown even in America, except to those fortunate enough to stumble across his name and music via Ives.

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