Customer Reviews:
Add This Encyclopedia To Your Library Today!!!.......2005-09-16
Most moviegoers and television-watchers are familiar with the cinematic accomplishments of Sidney Poitier, Cicely Tyson, James Earl Jones and other African-American icons. But how many recognize the names Oscar Micheaux, Fredi Washington, Spencer Williams or Nina Mae McKinney? How many know that in 1929 MGM released the first all African-American "talking" picture: "Hallelujah"? Or that "Beulah" (and not "Julia") was the first television sitcom (1950 thru 1953) to star a black woman: Louise Beavers? Or who was the first African-American to portrayed "God" in a motion picture? All of these facts and much, much more are revealed in this magnificent work.
Bogle's critiquing of the movies, television shows, actors and their performances is balanced and insightful. His analysis skillfully takes into consideration the racist nature of the motion picture business throughout the early years of America cinema, never sugarcoating or condemning the industry. His assessments are intelligently delivered and masterfully compliment the commentary and photographs throughout.
Published in 1988, this book is a bit dated. However, the historical value of its contents is invaluable. There are numerous photos and profiles of long-ago African-American movie stars, including Lena Horne, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, Dorothy Dandridge, Ethel Waters, Paul Robeson, Hattie McDaniel and Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas, as well as lesser-known artists such as Rex Ingram, Tim Moore, Lillian and Amanda Randolph and Mantan Moreland.
Bogle also critiques numerous television shows that featured or starred African-American performers, including "Benson", "Amos `n' Andy", "Room 222", "The Cosby Show", "I Spy", "Julia", "Amen" and even the short-lived, "Get Christie Love".
Fortunately, Bogle does not exclude more contemporary (remember, this book was written in 1988) African-American performers. Eddie Murphy, Richard Roundtree, Alfre Woodard, Diana Ross, Melvin Van Peebles and others are also profiled.
This is a very enjoyable, easy to read text. A complimentary addition to any library.
Oh, and by the way...the first African-American to portray "God" in a motion picture was Rex Ingram in the 1936 classic: "Green Pastures".
The definitive book on Black film and television.......1999-04-14
Donald Bogle does an excellent job listing every movie and television program that featured Black people in a prominent role. I read the book like a novel. This book is a fabulous research tool. A must have!!!!
Amazon.com
This is a scholarly assessment of the American composer Charles Ives, whose life and work have remained enigmatic since his death in 1954. A successful insurance executive in Hartford, Connecticut, Ives used a considerable part of his tidy income to promote serious modern music, and despite his day job maintained a prolific output of scores himself. He was a robustly opinionated and confident individual who eschewed easy listening; his atonal works were considered almost un-American. Yet he also sought recognition that just eluded him in his lifetime. Ives is increasingly known around the world. Jan Swafford, himself a composer, should help win even more interest with this sympathetic biography.
Book Description
An illuminating portrait of a man whose innovative works profoundly influenced the course of twentieth-century American classical music. Jan Swafford's colorful biography first unfolds in Ives's Connecticut hometown of Danbury, then follows Ives to Yale and on to his years in New York, where he began his double career as composer and insurance executive. The Charles Ives that emerges from Swafford's story is a precocious, well-trained musician, a brilliant if mercurial thinker about art and life, and an experimenter in the spirit of Edison and the Wright brothers.
A National Book Critics Circle nominee and a New York Times Notable Book.
Customer Reviews:
A Great American Composer Brought to Life.......2003-05-13
Charles Ives (1874-1954)was the first, and still probably the greatest, composer of a distinctly American art ("classical") music. His relationship to American music seems to me roughly parallel to Walt Whitman's relationship to American poetry and to Charles Peirce's relationship to American philosophy. Like Peirce, Ives was little-known during his lifetime. Furthermore, while many people may be aware of Peirce and of Ives, a much smaller number have much acquaintance with their works.
Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut and remained throughout his life attached to his vision of the post-Civil War small-town New England of his childhood. His father, George Ives, was a bandmaster and the greatest influence on Ives's life. Ives was a musical prodigy who began composing at an early age, quickly picking up experimental styles. He showed great proficiency at the piano and organ. (Through young manhood, we worked Sundays as a church organist.) He studied music at Yale where his teacher was Horatio Parker, a then famous American who was trained in the music of German Romanticism. As a college student, Ives wrote music played for the inaugaration of President William McKinley.
After graduation from Yale, Ives became a millionare in the insurance industry where he pioneered many marketing techniques. He also became increasingly Progessive and politically active and actually proposed a constitutional amendment which would increase the power of the democracy in government decision-making. At the age of 32, he married Harmony Twitchell who, after his father, was the greatest influence on his life.
Ives wrote music in the midst of an extraordinarily busy life. Most people think of Ives as a trailblazer and iconoclast. He was indeed, but may of his earlier works, such as the Second and the Third Symphonies are easily accessible and have a feel of America about them similar to the feelings Aaron Copland evoked some three decades later.
Jan Swafford's biography movingly and eloquently describes the life of Charles Ives. This is a reflective, thoughtful discussion of Ives, his America, his music, and its reception. In addition to a thorough treatment of Ives' life and works, Swafford has three chapters which he titles "Entra'acets" which consist of broad-based reflections on Ives's music and its significance. Swafford's entire book is full of ideas which are intriguing in themselves. Of Ives's work, Swafford gives his most extended treatment to the Fourth Symphony (he sees Ives as essentially a symphonist) and to the Concord piano Sonata. But many works are discussed in detail which will be accessible to the non-musician. The book has copious and highly substantive footnotes and an extensive bibliography.
Ives's Americanness, humor, romanticism, modernism, optimism, and generosity ( Ives gave large amounts of money to his family and to musicians and music publications. He also paid for the publication of several of his important works when commercial publishers showed no interest in them.) come through well. Swafford sees Ives as the last American transcendentalist in the tradition of Emerson. At the conclusion of his book, Swafford writes of Ives (p. 434)
" [I]n his music and his life he embodied a genuine pluralism, a wholeness beneath diversity, that in itself is a beacon for democracy and its art. Aesthetically he is an alternative to Modernism, an exploratory road without the darkness and despair of the twentieth century. In spirit he handed us a baton and calls on us to carry it further. He suggests a way out of despair, but leaves it to us to find the route for ourselves. If we are alone with ourselves today, Ives speaks incomparably to that condition."
This book made me want to learn more about and to hear the music of Charles Ives. In its own right, it is a joy and an inspiration to read.
Ives, the Bucky Fuller of American music!.......2002-03-18
Charlie Ives was a visionary, an idealist, and apparently a manic-depressive. Swafford tells his story in a compulsively readable fashion, and wins you over to the side of the irascible composer. Ives never made any money from his music, in fact he subsidized it with the fortune he made in the insurance industry. But he was generous in supporting the work of other sympathetic composers as well, including Henry Cowell. Ives was rare in that he was a genius not only in music, but in business. Ives made a fortune in developing the modern, mass-market life insurance industry. He wrote a tremendously influential pamphlet in 1910, "The Amount to Carry," which pioneered estate planning. Ives was an idealist and an altruist even as he became wealthy -- he convinced himself that insurance was socially progressive, and motivated his sales staff with his lofty vision of cooperation. Later in life, he developed this into a plan for a People's World Union!
Ives' great successes all came together, early in life, following his marriage. He composed on the side as he built his company, burning the candle at both ends. Swafford speculates that Ives was literally manic during those heroic years of the Teens, and that he subsequently crashed, enduring more depression than mania for the rest of his life. Interestingly, the Great War was such a blow to his idealism, he reacted physically, compounding his collapse. Ives retired very young, but rather than turn to composing, he found that he was unable. The rest of his life was devoted to trying to find an audience for the works of his glory years. I found the book most interesting here, in situating Ives in relation to the more well-known Modernists of his time -- Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Varese and the others. The irony is that while Ives' music came about independently, it was "popularized," only through association with the European revolutionaries, and so he was widely perceived as an imitator. The world was only ready for Charlie's music after the ground had been broken! The story of Cowell, Slonimsky, Carter, Gilman and Bernstein, who championed Ives over many years until he was finally recognized, is fascinating.
This is supremely enjoyable reading. Jan Swafford clearly loves Ives, and I found his account irresistable.
A high-water mark in musical biographies........2001-07-16
Quite recently, I had the privilege of reading a copy of this book that was the personal copy of a musician who had been involved, in a rather unique way, in the centennial observation of Charlie Ives's birthday back in 1974. For reasons of geography, then musical interest, he "got to know" Charlie quite well, even if only 20 years after Charlie's death. I immediately ordered my own copy, while continuing to read the heavily-annotated copy of my musician friend. (It was rather vicarious pleasure, "looking over the shoulder" of this musician, to see what it was about the music, life and times of Charlie that fascinated him.)
In his early years, Ives was a one-man dynamo. Learning much of his music theory and practice from his father George Ives, who had been a very young (perhaps the youngest) Civil War band leader, and then from Horatio Parker at Yale University, he had more than a "thorough grounding" in the basics. However, unlike most American composers, particularly those of his and the following generation, he did not go to Europe for a post-grad internship with any known European composer, but simply set out on his own after matriculating from Yale. He went to New York City, employed as an insurance clerk for one full-time job, wrote music constantly for another full-time job, and had yet another career, had he wanted it, as organist and choir director for the Central Presbyterian Church in New York. During this period - leading up to his marriage in 1908 - he literally burned the candle at both ends. (Swafford goes on, later in the book, to posit why Charlie had this incredible burst of energy for the first 15 or 20 years of his adult life, but it's best that his reasons for this - and for Ives's shortened composing career - be left to you, the potential reader.)
Most anyone who knows anything about Ives knows that he became comfortably wealthy in the insurance industry, that during his active composing days little of his music was played by anyone, and that he was - literally and figuratively - burned out by the time he was only 40. For the remaining half of his life, much of it was spent editing, publishing and promoting his music and the music of others, including many friends, using the proceeds from his insurance success to underwrite projects for many composers who would have gone unnoted had it not been for him. Musical success - unlike business success - came too late in life for him to truly enjoy at least its artistic, if not financial, rewards. He was in his last years when Leonard Bernstein premiered his Second Symphony, and never lived to hear his masterpiece - his Fourth Symphony - premiered by Leopold Stokowski in 1965. Despite this, he was far from an unhappy man in his later years; philosophically resigned yet optimistic that his day might yet come would be the more accurate description.
Swafford's writing is simply wonderful. It tells the story of a true American iconoclast; an "original." The narrative flows beautifully without omitting anything of significance in Ives's life or about his music. (The book contains nearly 80 pages of endnotes, in which the musical marginalia are explained in exhaustive, but emminently readable, detail, to preserve the flow of the main narrative.) In parts, it is incredibly moving. I particularly enjoyed the extended "mating dance" of his courting of Harmony Twichell, who was to become his life-long helpmate (and who did live long enough to attend the Stokowski premiere of his masterpiece, as the guest of honor). Ives, ever the Victorian man if something else as a composer, would always refer to her, to third parties, as "Mrs. Ives." Yet their fifty years together could be a model for today's dysfunctional families. A beautiful chapter; one of the best in the book.
There's a curiously cryptic endnote that suggests a "what might have been." It is a fact that very little of Ives's music saw public performance before the early 30's, when Nicholas Slonimsky championed Ives and other "moderns." Yet another two decades were to pass until Bernstein premiered the Second Symphony. Yet, in 1910, while shopping in a music store in preparation for his final return to Vienna, where he would die in less than a year's time, Gustav Mahler purchased a fair copy - one of only two or three in existence - of Ives's Third Symphony. Swafford doesn't make that big a deal about this, but I do. I've always thought that Ives and Mahler, aside from being near-contemporaries, had more in common than they did in opposition. It is just conjecture - but truly fascinating conjecture - to think what might have happened had Mahler premiered Ives's Third Symphony at a time in the life of Ives when it really might have made a difference.
Just what was Ives, as a composer? Bernstein did him no favors by calling him "a primitive; a Grandma Moses of music" while at the same time championing his music. Back in those days, there were no labels like "atonalist," "serialist," "avant-gardist," "post-modernist," what-have-you, that we tend to use today to compartmentalize a composer. To me, Ives was, well... an iconoclast, an "original," and, if a label must be applied, our first "pre-post-modern." He was never imitated, at least not successfully, not only because he didn't have his own students as did other composers, but because by the time his music enjoyed sufficient - if not plentiful - performances, composers' agendas were different.
Fortunately audiences think differently, and do enjoy Charlie's music. And you will enjoy this book.
Bob Zeidler
Accessible tale of a musical maverick with a business head.......1998-07-09
Well written and accessible, the book describes the life of America's preeminent composer in the European tradition. A man who successfully forged a truly personal musical vocabulary on strong and deep American musical rootstock. Yet his only commercial success came through his equally great (though far less consequential) business talents. A continuing cautionary parable about the creative arts in the United States. I wish there were more score excerpts included.
Great combination of erudition and accessibility.......1996-11-15
Not being a music professional, I was pleasantly surprised to find this book not only made Ives come to life but explained the music in a way that neither addressed the lowest common denominator nor spoke exclusively to the ivory tower crowd. The love letters between Ives and his wife Harmony (yes, that really is her name) are incredibly moving for an insurance exec. Saw a good review in Newsweek; agree with its assessment: "one of the best biographies in recent years."
Average customer rating:
- I can't overestimate the value of this priceless collection.
- The Place To Start
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Charles Ives Remembered: AN ORAL HISTORY (Music in American Life)
Vivian Perlis
Manufacturer: University of Illinois Press
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Charles Ives: A Life With Music
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Charles E. Ives: Memos
ASIN: 025207078X |
Customer Reviews:
I can't overestimate the value of this priceless collection........2003-05-09
I have my days when I feel as if I've known Charlie Ives all my life. Of course, this is physically impossible: when Charlie died, in 1954, I was only fifteen, and I didn't hear any of his music at least until a few years later, in college. And even then, there wasn't all that much of it available on LP. But, over a period now approaching a half-century, my knowledge of, and admiration for, the man and his music grew steadily, if at first slowly.
With this steady accumulation of knowledge now at the point where I feel at ease ("comfortable in my skin," one might say) with providing some informed commentary, I suggest to readers interested in learning about Charlie, and his life and music, two recommendations. The first recommendation is that they read Jan Swafford's "Charles Ives: A Life with Music," one of the most superb books of its kind, totally sympathetic to the man but at the same time not close-minded to his "warts" and their possible causes.
The second is of course this book by Vivian Perlis, one of the most remarkable of its kind. It is one of the most frequently quoted resources by Ives scholars and writers, and obviously so.
The reason for its very existence is almost as fascinating as its contents. Perlis, in 1968, had been working with the Ives Collection, and, to quote her (in the Preface), "I became aware that there were [...] people still living who had known and worked with [Ives], and that an effort [...] be made to [...] preserve their memories of him."
Ives died in 1954, in his eighthieth year. At the time of the start of Perlis's project, then, those of his contemporaries still alive who knew him were already well in their nineties. Mrs. Ives (Harmony Twichel Ives) was still alive, but too ill to be interviewed. (She died on Good Friday, April 4, 1969.) Ives's business partner, Julian Myrick, was able to be interviewed, but he passed on in the course of the project. Charlie's piano tuner died on the day he was to be scheduled to be intereviewed. There were only three Yale classmates who survived long enough to be interviewd. Facts such as these explain the need on Perlis's part to "work against time" in her plan to capture as many direct recollections as possible in putting together this oral history.
Perlis's subjects included, of course, family members, as well as friends and neighbors, most of them from succeeding generations. (Charlie's brother, Moss Ives, had six children [five nephews of Charlie and Harmony, and one niece]; three of the nephews provide some of the best recollections. Sadly, Charlie's niece, Sarane [Sally], as well as his own daughter, Edith [Edie], died in 1956, only two years after him.) Perlis even interviewed Charlie's personal secretary, his barber, and the architect who was responsible for remodeling his West Redding, CT home. Each provides his or her glimpse of the man. That these glimpses are often reminiscent of blind men describing an elephant speaks to the complexities of an outwardly simple-appearing man.
A large portion of the book covers recollections of musicians who knew and worked with Charlie. While all were of the succeeding younger generation, they can lay claim to being the closest to Charles Ives the composer and musician. The list reads like a "Who's Who" of mid-20th century American music: Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Lehman Engel, Lou Harrison, Bernard Herrmann, John Kirkpatrick, Goddard Lieberson, Carl Ruggles and Nicolas Slonimsky among others.
Each of these musical friends achieved fame for his own contributions to the art. Each remembered Charlie in the greatest of detail and anecdote, often in terms that bordered on "reverential" and with individual insights which added substantially to a better understanding of his musical psyche.
With one exception: Elliott Carter. Carter, still alive and kicking (and composing) at age 94, was one of the very earliest beneficiaries of Charlie's intellectual and personal largesse. As a teen-age high schooler, he was often invited to Charlie's W. 74th Street townhouse, a comfortably short distance from Carnegie Hall, where they would take in concerts and then talk about what they heard. Given that these were Carter's "formative years," one might think (and some do) that Carter was the logical successor to Charlie. In my judgement, he wasn't; there are simply too many differences between the two, in terms of compositional aesthetic, for the relationship to be valid. And, of all the musical associates interviewed, only Carter, in what I feel to be mean-spirited commentary, was negative about Charlie's contributions to American music. (It is more than a little interesting that Perlis, in her Preface, found it necessary to state that of all the interviews, only Carter's, as published, differed substantially from the raw interview material. One can only wonder at just what was expurgated!)
I am indebted to J Scott Morrison, fellow music lover and Amazon.com reviewer, for bringing to my attention that, in addition to Elliott Carter, there is one other survivor to this day who can claim direct contact with Charlie. That other person is Paul Moor, who interviewed Charlie for the September 1948 edition of Harper's. Moor (now in his late 70s) was in Europe between about 1953 and 1979, and therefore "out of reach" (and likely off the radar screen) of Perlis. It is too bad that this understandable omission is nonetheless an omisson. Perhaps Moor's judgement would offset Carter's; perhaps not.
In searching for a comparable book about another composer, the closest I can come to Perlis's unquestioned masterpiece is Elizabeth Wilson's "Shostakovich: A Life Remembered." But, whereas reading first-hand accounts about Shostakovich's life can often be an exercise in pain, given the circumstances of that life, reading about Charlie's life only seems to bring me joy. I hope it does for you as well.
Bob Zeidler
The Place To Start.......2003-03-16
This is the first book I read about Charles Ives, and I'm happy that it's still in print. If you are new to Charles Ives, I would suggest that you start here. If you have the funds, I also recommend you pick up Jan Swafford's excellant biography.
Why is this book the best place to start? The book is a compilation of thoughtful and revealing rememberances from Mr.Ives's close friends and his family, all personally interviewed by the author. We even get to hear what Mr.Ives's barber had to say about him! Perhaps most moving is the interview with Brewster, Mr.Ives's nephew.
This book is also chock full of photos and pictures of Mr.Ives's original manuscripts.
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The Life of Charles Ives (Musical Lives)
Stuart Feder
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
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ASIN: 0521599318 |
Book Description
Ives' life (1874-1955) spanned two centuries; he grew up in the nineteenth and composed chiefly in the twentieth. His nostalgia for a simpler life in the New England town of his youth is revealed in his frequent musical quotation of songs of that earlier time: parlor and patriotic songs, hymns and gospel music that he learned from his father, a village bandmaster, and the most important influence on his life and music. This book clarifies the complexity of the man and his music--music that is uniquely autobiographical and that itself illuminates the narrative.
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Charles Ives, A Life with Music.: An article from: American Scholar
Robert C. Jones
Manufacturer: Phi Beta Kappa Society
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ASIN: B00097JK1E
Release Date: 2005-07-28 |
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This digital document is an article from American Scholar, published by Phi Beta Kappa Society on January 1, 1998. The length of the article is 1562 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Charles Ives, A Life with Music.
Author: Robert C. Jones
Publication:
American Scholar (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 1998
Publisher: Phi Beta Kappa Society
Volume: v67
Issue: n1
Page: p187(3)
Article Type: Book Review
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Customer Reviews:
Charles Ives, evaluated on his centennial anniversary........2004-05-27
How better to observe the month of the 50th anniversary of Charles Ives's death (May 19, 1954) than with some comments on a 30-year-old book that celebrated the 100th anniversary of his birth? Well, I can't think of a better way for this special month.
The year 1974 saw a flurry of Ivesian activity, in performances and recordings of Ives's music, and in symposia and publications. This book-"An Ives Celebration"-while not published until 1977, captures a series of symposia and concerts held during the Charles Ives Centennial Festival-Conference of 17 - 21 October, 1974. It is, to my way of thinking, the best Ives centennial book, and as such is a true collector's item. (In stark contrast, unquestionably the *worst* book to come out of the Ives centennial year was David Wooldridge's "From the Steeples and Mountains," a work I previously reviewed in some depth at its Amazon.com product page.)
While this book is edited by H. Wiley Hitchcock and Vivian Perlis, two Ives scholars who are still very much with us today, I think that they would forgive me for saying that the book-and the Festival-Conference as well-might never have happened had it not been for the two decades' worth of groundbreaking scholarly work that John Kirkpatrick did, beginning at Ives's death. It was during these two fertile decades of scholarly work that much of the "unknown Ives"-who had been not much more than a curious footnote to musical history at the time of his death-became the "known Ives." And, in large measure, "by this book, ye shall know Ives."
The proceedings (papers and panel discussions) are divided into five main sections. In addition, there are three appendices, one of which lists all of the concert performances, with fully-detailed programs, that were held in conjunction with the Festival-Conference. These performances are literally a "Who's Who" of Ivesians of that time: Kirkpatrick, William Masselos, Gregg Smith, the Orpheus Chamber Ensemble, James Sinclair, Jonathan Elkus, Robert Shaw, John Mauceri, Helen Boatwright and Phyllis Curtin, to mention just some of the artists. It is a shame that no recordings of those concerts appear to have survived.
The first section, "Ives and American Culture," endeavors, in three presentations, to put Ives into a proper social context and cultural milieu. It is, in my estimation, the portion that has worn the least well over the years. Robert M. Crunden endeavors to include Ives among the great progressivists of the era, including Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and John Dewey, inter alia. Frank R. Rossiter-the first Ives scholar to submit Ives's life and works to psychological analysis-argues (largely) that Ives's self-imposed isolation, the narrowness of his cultural experiences, his emphasis on "masculinity" and his absolutist moral positions were largely the outgrowth of his upbringing, the early death of his father (whom he clearly both idolized and idealized), and the failure of America and the world to conform to his ideals (particularly in the years following the end of WW I). Neely Bruce compares Ives to his earlier American predecessors, including the "Second New England School" that included Horatio Parker, his Yale mentor, but, to my way of thinking, with too much emphasis on Stephen Foster as an "Ivesian precursor/paradigm." Much of this "1974 thinking" represents, in retrospect, examples of blind men endeavoring to explain the elephant. A far better and much more complete picture of the complexities of Ives emerges in Jan Swafford's "Charles Ives: A Life With Music."
The real meat of these proceedings, and the reason why this book is especially worth tracking down, lies in the latter three sections. "On Editing Ives" (Section III) illuminates the challenges scholars have had to deal with, in coming to grips with a lifetime's worth of stored manuscripts exceeding 700 works, and the range of creative solutions they have devised for realizing many of these works. "On Conducting and Performing Ives" (Section IV) relates the conductorial experiences of Lehman Engel, John Mauceri, Gunther Schuller, Nicolas Slonimsky, Gregg Smith and others in dealing with the technical difficulties inherent in Ives's orchestral and choral compositions. Much closer to home, on a personal note, is a splendid symposium by Nancy and Alan Mandel in performing Ives's violin sonatas, vastly underappreciated works now more dear to me than ever with the recent gift of the scores for these from a friend.
The concluding section ("Ives and Present-Day Musical Thought") contains two of the best presentations of the Festival-Conference. "Spatial Form in Ives," by Robert P. Morgan (who was to write, four years later, "Ives and Mahler: Mutual Responses at the End of an Era," a seminal essay that ties together large areas of compositional-aesthetics common ground between these otherwise dramatically different composers), sets out in splendid detail the highly-specific dynamic and spatial indications that Ives wrote into many of his works, how such demands were unique (owing largely to Ives's commitment to "write for himself rather than for performance"), and how observance of these indications results in music that continues to sound so fresh a century later. And Allen Forte, a leading expert on atonality theory and its description in terms of "sets" (of notes), in "Ives and Atonality," provides a rather exhaustive analysis of the atonality found in Ives's works, comparing aspects of atonality in Ives's compositions in depth to those of Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Berg that were written years later.
As noted earlier, Ives has been the elephant to more than a few blind men. It seems to me-perhaps as a consequence of totally immersing myself in the widest possible range of his music-that he is best appreciated and understood by embracing him in his Whitmanesque totality. This collector's item of a book goes a long way toward a fuller, richer understanding of his uniqueness. Highly-even urgently-recommended to every Ivesian.
Bob Zeidler
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