A decent, thoughtful, and idealistic biography of American music's
radical idealist. Judged by the first criterion of musical
biography - does it make us want to listen to the music? - this
portrait of "Charlie" Ives must be counted a success. Yankee
bandmaster's son, Yalie, rebel modernist, insurance executive, and
Romantic visionary who spent the last quarter-century of his life
retouching a "Universe" symphony that was never completed to his
satisfaction: The outline of the story is familiar to readers with
a general interest in 20th-century American music. Swafford's
personal slant is frankly to admit his own sympathy with the social
progressivism that underlay Ives's approach to both his art and his
go-getting business career. Unlike the psychobiographers who have
been attracted to Ives (see Stuart Feder's Charles Ives, "My
Father's Song"), Swafford has no interest in probing Ives's
weaknesses. He is receptive to, rather than critical of, the
expansive, can-do, "universalist individualism" - a legacy from the
19th-century Transcendentalists whom Ives "portrayed" in the
Concord Sonata - which shaped Ives's beliefs about family,
marriage, career, and artistic output. Since the author owns to
this empathetic approach to his subject, the reader is readier to
pardon the occasional gushing quality of Swafford's prose and some
questionable, frankly subjective music judgements (e.g., The
Unanswered Question is not a work of Ives's musical maturity). To
his credit, Swafford has done a good job of setting out the
gratifying story of how Ives's music was championed and actively
promoted by other composers and musical leaders, including Aaron
Copland, Henry Cowell, Leonard Bernstein, and Leopold Stokowski. A
conscientious, intellectually honest sifting of the plentiful
evidence, though undoubtedly not the last word on its subject.
(Kirkus Reviews)
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 sensitive, specific, gracefully worded and remarkably clearheaded book that is both an engrossing biography of a craggy, idiosyncratic New England 'character' and a detailed examination of the work he left behind."—Washington Post Book World, Editors' Choice
"First-rate. . . . Thoughtful, witty, instructive, this is one of the best biographies in recent memory, as warm and strangely inspiring as the man and the music it describes."—Newsweek
"A superb writer. . . . [Swafford has] brought the old curmudgeon . . . to vivid life, at once a comic and a tragic figureand in terms of his significance in American artistic life, on the level of Twain or Whitman."—Publishers Weekly starred review
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