CHAPTER 8 | FURTHER READING 203
declining, and its progress would
be understood best by people sing-
ing, playing, and composing in
the course of their daily lives. Ives
knew from experience the resis-
tance his music would meet. But
he could imagine a future in which
his works could help people attune
themselves to the spiritual dimen-
sion of human life in an intercon-
nected universe.
Because Ives’s music came to
public knowledge long after it was
written, the story of its discovery
and performance belongs to a later
time (see chapter 12). From the
1930s on, Ives’s profi le was recast more than once, as “new” works were discov-
ered and views of them adjusted to fi t the perspectives of composers, critics,
and historians at that particular time. His contributions include a substantial
body of music, some of it radically individual in style; an original aesthetic phi-
losophy; and a symbolic presence that has served as a barometer of attitudes
toward American composition for more than a half century since his death.QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION AND REVIEW
- Compare and contrast the state of classical music in the United States in the
periods before and after the Civil War. - W hat did the late nineteenth-century Boston composers have in common
with each other? How was MacDowell like them in training, values, and out-
put, and how was he different? - What circumstances in her life set Amy Beach apart from the other Boston
composers and from MacDowell? - Listen to Dvorˇák’s New World Symphony and MacDowell’s Indian Suite. W hat
are their similarities and differences? - W hat features mark Charles Ives’s music as radically different from that of
the other composers discussed in this chapter? - W hat musical traditions are connected with Ives’s music? How are his atti-
tudes toward these traditions expressed in his music and his writings about
music?
FURTHER READING
Block, Adrienne Fried. Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian: The Life and Work of an American
Composer, 1867–1944. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Crawford, Richard. “Edward MacDowell: Musical Nationalism and an American Tone
Poet.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 49 (1996): 528–60.Charles Ives on the Future of Music (1922)
T
he instinctive and progressive interest of every man in art will
go on and on, ever fulfi lling hopes, ever building new ones, ever
opening new horizons, until the day will come when every man while
digging potatoes will breathe his own epics, his own symphonies
(operas, if he likes it); and as he sits of an evening in his backyard
and shirt sleeves smoking his pipe and watching his brave children
in their fun of building their themes for their sonatas of their life,
he will look up over the mountains and see his visions in their
reality, will hear the transcendental strains of the day’s symphony
resounding in their many choirs, and in all their perfection, through
the west wind and the tree tops!In their own words
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