Charles Ives: A Life With Music

by Jan Swafford

A colorful portrait of the enigmatic composer/insurance executive who changed the face of twentieth-century American music discusses Ives's early life in Danbury, Connecticut, his musical inspiration, and the rich assortment of Ives's writings and musical works.

Genres: Music, Biography, Nonfiction, History, Classical Music

525 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1996

About the author

Jan Swafford is a composer and writer. His musical works range from orchestral and chamber to film and theater music, including four pieces for orchestra, Midsummer Variations for piano quintet, They That Mourn for piano trio, They Who Hunger for piano quartet, From the Shadow of the Mountain for string orchestra and the theatrical work, Iphigenia, for choir, instruments and a narrator.

Swafford's music has been played around the country and abroad by ensembles including the symphonies of Indianapolis, St. Louis, Harrisburg, Springfield, Jacksonville, Chattanooga and the Dutch Radio. Among his honors are a National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) Composers Grant and two Massachusetts Artists Council Fellowships. His work appears on CRI recordings and is published by Peer Southern. From 1999-2002, he was Composer-in-Residence of Market Square Concerts in Harrisburg.

Swafford holds degrees in music from Harvard and Yale. His teachers have included Jacob Druckman, Earl Kim and, at Tanglewood, Betsy Jolas. From 1988-1989 he was a Mellon Faculty Fellow at Harvard. Swafford currently teaches music history, theory and composition at The Boston Conservatory.

As a musical journalist and scholar, Swafford has appeared in Slate, Guardian International, Gramophone, Symphony and 19th-Century Music. He has written program notes for the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), the Chicago and San Francisco Symphonies, Chamber Music at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall programs and Naxos and Sony Classical Recordings. Since 1998, he has participated in musical features on Nation Public Radio (NPR's) Performance Today and Morning Edition, and he is a regular preconcert lecturer for the BSO. His books include The Vintage Guide to Classical Music and the biographies, Charles Ives: A Life with Music from Norton (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award, winner of the PEN/Winship prize) and Johannes Brahms: A Biography from Knopf. Currently, Swafford is writing a biography of Beethoven for Houghton Mifflin.

Reviews

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Great American Composer Brought To Life

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, he 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 inauguration of President William McKinley.

After graduation from Yale, Ives became a millionaire in the insurance industry where he pioneered many marketing techniques. He also became increasingly Progressive 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. He offers 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

" [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.

Robin Friedman

[Marianne Meyers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Awesome, definitive biography. I am a Charles Ives fan so I found it riveting. I knew a good overview of his life before, but this book covered all his years. A fascinating, original American genius!

[Caleb · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this. For a while I even thought I was. When this book is talking about Charles Ives as a person, or about his family, it's an amazingly fascinating book. The story of his father, what I got of his wife, his co-workers, his other family and friends, and just people that were a part of his life in some manner, this was the one of the best reads I've had in a very long time.

The problem comes when it comes time to discuss his music.

Now, I preface this by saying that while I do know a little bit about music theory and a fair bit more about music history and where Charles stands in the grand scheme of things, I am far from an expert when it comes to analyzing music.

That said, Jan Swafford probably knows what he's talking about when he's analyzing Charles' work, but my god is it boring, and at times repetitive. There are two camps that the works always gets classified into; those written when he still had much to learn and those when he did not. First of all, duh. Second of all, it's stated every time we get into a new section of musical analysis. I get it. He wasn't learned enough to know how to write the thing, or later on, yes, now he knows that it must be this way. You don't need to tell me again. It's annoying and feels like you're talking down to me sometimes.

The other stuff he talks about is just over my head half the time, and feels made up the rest. Some of it we can trace back to Charles' notes, so okay, fine. But some of it you're reaching for out of thin air and I find it a waste of my time to read, especially as someone who is confused by some of the music talk as it is. And believe me, I'm trying. I've even got my few books on music theory out so I can make sure I know what I'm reading.

In the end though, I can't force myself through this anymore. For something I thought would be geared more towards the casual reader, this is clearly not that. It really wants to be an academic level book, and comes close at times. If that's what you're looking for, great. Have at it. For me, I'm done.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best biographies I've read. Part biography and part music notes, a good portion of this book analyzes significant works by Ives, placing them in context of his life. The other portion is just as well-written and engaging.

[Danielle McCoin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an exceptional biography. I am a better person for reading it and have a better grasp on music history and our society in general. It is not for the faint of heart. Stafford has a vocabulary that could flummox most professors. His detail and scholarship are rarely rivaled, yet the book was thoroughly enjoyable.

[Paul Secor · Rating 4 out of 5]

All that you've ever wanted to know - perhaps more than you've ever wanted to know - it's a long fairly thorough biography - about Charles Ives. If you've lived with and gotten to know something of his music, you'll probably want to read this.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most engrossing biographies I've read. It adds somethig to the reading to have a little exposure to some of Ives' music.

[Marvin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've long been fascinated with the music of Charles Ives (though admittedly I prefer his milder efforts, which he--and this author--think less highly of), so, on seeing a recommendation of this biography, I decided to tackle it. It helped me understand his appeal to me and gave me a much more profound understanding of his music. He is, like the three characters in my own doctoral dissertation (in American religious history, not music history) what I call a "boundary" figure, one who doesn't fit neatly in any of the categories people are tempted to put him in. I had thought of him as a prototypical "American" composer. (How religious leaders, like many composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, reflected national cultures was another focus of my academic work.) But this author shows that that is not really an accurate perception of Ives; he was more driven by the particularities of his coming of age in a small New England city but at the same time had a more universalist, more "Romantic" vision. He was also seen, in the 1920s and '30s, as one of the "Ultra-Modernist" composers, like Varese, Henry Brant, and others, but, while he joined forces with them, his music was not really of a piece with theirs (he thought all music was "program music," that there was no such thing as "pure" or abstract music), and he disdained the more Americanist composers, such as Aaron Copland, as soft. Yet this author repeatedly claims that, at his peak of productivity, he was composing in a way that was totally new, that nobody else--not Stravinsky nor Schoenberg nor anyone else--was yet using dissonance the way he was. I'm not equipped to know if that claim is exaggerated, but I'm inclined to accept it. The book also corrected a couple of misperceptions I brought to it. I had thought of Ives as a mostly untutored composer, something like William Billings from 150 or so years earlier. But the author shows how well trained he was and how complex his music is technically. (I had not really understood the technical challenges it presents to performers.) I also had grossly underestimated his success as a business man. (He used his fortune to try to get his music performed, discovering along the way that theater pit orchestras that he paid to try out his music handled it better than top-level professional orchestras.) So, all in all, I very much appreciated this biography even if it bogged down occasionally, especially at the height of Ives's creativity, when it becomes a series of analyses of his individual compositions, much of which was over my head, and not all that interesting even when it wasn't. In a later chapter the author gets too bogged down in Ives's political rantings, and, still later, gives us more detail than necessary about all the early performances of his work. A couple of favorite quotes I failed to record and can't find now: One about his 6-year-old daughter saying that she loved to hear the piano keys being washed because it reminded her of her Daddy's music! Another noted how Ives's father--a bandmaster, music teacher, and choir director--would, as an ear training exercise, have his choirs sing in one key while he accompanied in another key. Charles himself devised polyrhythmic exercises for himself at the keyboard: "in the left hand a 5--with the left foot, beat a 2--with the right foot, beat a 3--with the right hand, play an 11--and sing a 7." Just 2 against 3 is enough of a challenge for man of us!

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A MASTERFUL BIOGRAPHY OF THE FIRST "ORIGINAL" AMERICAN COMPOSER

Jan Swafford (born 1946) is an American composer and author who teaches at The Boston Conservatory, and the author of 'Johannes Brahms: A Biography.' He wrote in the Preface to this 1996 book, "this book amounts to a sustained meditation on Ives's achievement as an artist. That achievement I take to be manifestly flawed but in the end gigantic... the scope of his achievement has finally begun to sink in. This book tries to capture that moment in our journey with his music." (Pg. xiv-xv) [NOTE: page numbers correspond to the 525-page hardcover edition.)

He observes, "Among his experiments with piano-drumming and bell sonorities and his polytonal inclinations, by the end of his teens Ives had stretched his ears to encompass a harmonic vocabulary enormously broader than that of any other composer in history, and which in practice phased into atonality." (Pg. 91) He writes of Ives' music instructor Horatio Parker, "Though he learned more than he ever admitted, Ives would never forgive Parker's orthodoxy, his coldness, his failure to recognize talent, and most of all his failure to fulfill the impossible expectation of becoming George Ives's successor." (Pg. 112) Upon graduation, "A promising musical career lay ahead of him. All he had to do was embrace it." (Pg. 134)

Swafford suggests that with Ives 2nd and 3rd symphonies, he "created, single-handedly, the nationalistic art music for which Dvorak had called and a good many American composers attempted without success. Rather than trying to cash in on that accomplishment, Ives moved on... His goal was never in the direction of what he would denounce as 'the old medieval idea of nationalism.'" (Pg. 158) He records, "Two weeks after the premiere of 'The Celestial Country,' Ives took what he decided was the appropriate next step in his artistic career. He quit... Abandoning the path of a conventional composer ... he would write no more church music. He had discovered that making music people wanted to hear put his creative soul at risk. He would never apply for another musical position." (Pg. 160)

He notes of his earliest fans, "Whitmer and especially Furness, were Scriabinists. Many early Ivesians would be the same, and many of those followed theosophy or anthroposophy or one of the other esoteric systems fashionable among artists on both sides of the Atlantic." (Pg. 323) He records with irony, "So between 1919 and 1923 Charles Ives, whose later legend said he hardly cared if his music was heard, spend some 60,000 late-century dollars printing and distributing his music and words." (Pg. 325)

Swafford's highly detailed biography is absolutely enthralling for those of us who are lovers of Ives' music.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

As with the other composer biographies by Jan Swafford, I think it would be facile to say that this is a fine, or even a great one. “Charles Ives: A Life with Music” naturally presents the facts of the noted American composer’s life in logical sequence and with the expected refinements of prose style. More importantly, this biography does much to paint a convincing picture of American life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is an era in US history that is now quite in the past and one that people, politicians in particular, like to sentimentalize, so that it is both refreshing and useful to gain a clearer picture of what life in this country then consisted of. Personally, I especially enjoyed reading about father George Ives’s experiences as the youngest bandmaster in the Union Army during the Civil War. Swafford’s later retelling of the young Charles Ives’s years as musical enfant terrible, senior football team player, and member of Wolf’s Head at Yale I also found revealing. Throughout, I was fascinated by the composer’s talent, intelligence, clearsightedness, forceful originality, and courage. As I read, I tried to acquaint myself with works by Ives I did not yet know. My aural understanding of his music grew a stretch in the few weeks I devoted to reading this biography, and I encourage other readers to familiarize themselves with at least some of the Ives compositions they have not already heard. For me, becoming reacquainted with the Fourth Symphony was especially rewarding; I listened to it twice through consecutively scarcely noticing that a full hour had clicked by. In general, having read three Swafford biographies, I now recognize a tendency in the author to portray a composer’s father in most glowing colors. Since Swafford’s next published biography will be on Mozart, a continuation of this trend can only be envisioned.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

This lengthy biography of American composer Charles Ives was quite detailed but remained engrossing throughout. Swafford of course concentrates on Ives' musical career rather than his work in the insurance industry. Swafford really brings Ives and his world to life, especially Ives' boyhood and adolescence in Danbury, CT, as those experiences were very central to Ives' music. I also liked the way the book treats Ives' courtship and relationship with his wife Harmony as a real love story. Swafford does a great job of providing lots of insight into Ives' music, how he wrote it, and how it works, without getting into tedious descriptions or lengthy technical analysis. It leaves you with a strong desire to listen to the music.

[Charles Staley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ives was a genius. No question. No debate. His complete separation from public acclaim is his legacy. This book shows how important it is to keep your north star front and center. This book sets forth his ideals and his aspirations so that we can now begin to understand the absolute brilliance of this man.

[Thomas Hager · Rating 4 out of 5]

VERY deep dive into the life of an interesting American composer.

[Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Coming shortly.

[Bart · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a dense and difficult, but ultimately wondrous, biography of a generally misunderstood Yankee composer who changed American classical music.

Charles Ives wrote some of the most innovative scores of the 20th century in his home, and at night and on vacation, while building a life-insurance empire in Connecticut. He tried desperately to get his music heard - by himself primarily - and generally failed, even while paying enormous sums to musicians to perform his tunes. Decades after diabetes took his will and ability to write new symphonies, Ives's music was discovered by America and the rest of the world. By then, he was a generally content, though sometimes cranky, old survivor too jaded by innumerable failures to care very much waht others opined of him.

Jan Swafford's writing is excellent throughout. Here are a few examples.

On Charles Ives's father and hero:

"Certainly he realized that as far as most of the town was concerned he was finally getting a job, finally growing up. To them he was a failure because he had only been a musician. To himself he was a failure because he hadn't made a go at the job he loved."

On pianist and Ives custodian John Kirkpatrick:

"Handsome and dandyish, he was part of Heyman's circle and so ran with an arty, polysexual Parisian crowd among the intoxicating atmosphere of Joyce and Pound and Hemingway . . . Kirkpatrick kept a mistress financed by his brother and flirted with the occult."

And on Charles Ives at the end:

"Yet few people who knew Ives thought of him as a tragic man, but rather as an energetic and delightful and fascinating figure, a mythical creature in the flesh, a perpetual event."

This book is not a light undertaking - it could take you a month to read - but it is a worthwhile one.

[Andy Troyanos · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came into this book fascinated and curious about the man who wrote that wonderful, strange and out of the blue shocking ending to his own Second Symphony. Who would have the intestinal fortitude to create that ending in 1903 (he actually added the chord cluster in the 30's, but that doesn't make it less interesting), something so alien to every bit of music that came before it, what kind of man does that? Little did I know he considered this "soft" music. His fascination with music that leads with dissonance, shakes your ear drums, and to find that the man's belief system is more focused on the improvement of mankind than any success in the field of music was a huge surprise. This book makes you feel connected to the man, in a way that as soon as I finished, I missed reading it, and being with Charles and Harmony. That being said the book does drag in the middle a bit, but it still is so worth the journey it gets 5 starts from me. I highly recommend that while you're reading it, to cue up Youtube (if you don't own the recordings) and find the pieces online that are being discussed. Reading about them are one thing, but hearing them will change the way you hear music. When I heard Elvis Costello and Tom Waits, ordinary rock music never sounded the same again and it's actually hard to listen to that style of music again, now listening to Ives, all music sounds different to me now. It's a sound that doesn't just change the way you listen to music, but changes the way you look at life. Enjoy the dissonance, it has a home with the consonance and doesn't need to be covered by mainstream art, music and creativity that's only use is to sound "nice".

[Nathanial · Rating 1 out of 5]

BORING!

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

The biographical parts of the book I found most interesting. There were some parts, especially near the end that were bogged down with analysis but over-all a very good book.