Modern American music: from Charles Ives to the minimalists

1997 ◽  
Vol 34 (07) ◽  
pp. 34-3785-34-3785
Keyword(s):  
American Music ◽  
Charles Ives

Aspects of Copland's Development

Tempo ◽  
1971 ◽  
pp. 23-29
Author(s):  
Normal Kay
Keyword(s):  
American Music ◽  
European Language ◽  
Charles Ives ◽  
Intrinsic Quality ◽  
Nadia Boulanger ◽  
The Many ◽  
Single Figure

With Aaron Copland's maturity as a composer, American music gained a conscious identity, a persona, a style. Large claims, admittedly, but historically justified, even if it may be argued that they tell us little about the intrinsic quality of his work. About one thing, however, there can be no doubt: when Copland returned from his Parisian studies with Nadia Boulanger (1924), there was no style which could readily be accepted as quintessentially American—as a distillation of experience which belonged to that continent and to no other. There had been a number of brave attempts—composers who had seen the need to swing away from traditional European polarities—but no single figure had bridged the gap between his internal imagination and the responses of the outside world. This didacticism is necessary because of the extraordinary figure of Charles Ives—that enormous image that will loom over American music as long as it is played. Ives, an intrinsically richer personality, more copiously gifted, failed where Copland succeeded. The contrast between their personalities tells us more about the America they both idealised than any separate survey of their works could do. They are, in fact, the antitheses of American music. Both had the rare courage to bring their initially unwelcome attitudes into the full glare of public light, so that their impact could be openly assessed—a fact which would certainly not have been applicable to the many composers who were still vacillating between the accepted quasi-European language, and a kind of regressive provincialism.

Sonata for American Studies: Perspectives on Charles Ives

Prospects ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 1-58
Author(s):  
Betty E. Chmaj
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
American Studies ◽  
New York Times ◽  
American Music ◽  
Frank Lloyd Wright ◽  
Charles Ives ◽  
Piano Works ◽  
American Composer ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
Norman Rockwell

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.”

John Esputa, John Philip Sousa and the Boundaries of a Musical Career

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-46
Author(s):  
Patrick Warfield
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Music ◽  
Concert Band ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Ives ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

From the standpoint of the twenty-first century, the breadth of John Philip Sousa's career seems remarkable and unprecedented. His marches, of course, continue to dominate concert band programmes around the world. But Sousa was also a notably profitable composer of dances, songs and descriptive works that were once performed not only by bands, but also by orchestras, soloists and parlour musicians. His successful run as a theatre violinist, operetta composer, novelist and commentator made the Sousa name omnipresent in late nineteenth-century American cultural life. Given his considerable breadth and remarkable fame, it is hardly surprising that Sousa's name is found in seven of the 20 chapters that comprise the recent Cambridge History of American Music (second only to Charles Ives).

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.

Weirdness at Midnight

2020 ◽  
pp. 109-122
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Welizarowicz
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
American Music ◽  
Charles Ives ◽  
Underground Resistance ◽  
House Music

Dorothea Gail. Weird American Music: Case Studies of Underground Resistance, BarlowGirl, Jackalope, Charles Ives, and Waffle House Music. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018, 413 pages.

American Music and American Musicology

1982 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-62
Author(s):  
Gilbert Chase
Keyword(s):  
American Music
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