Awhile back I noted composer Henry F. Gilbert’s response to receiving, from the unknown Charles Ives, a copy of the Concord Sonata and accompanying essays: a friend of Gilbert’s, admiring the essays, had remarked, “Depend upon it, this fellow is a bad composer – good composers are usually non compos mentis on every other subject.†Only yesterday, though, in Jan Swafford’s superb Ives biography, did I notice Ives’s justifiably arrogant yet heartbreaking answer to him:
Your friend, the critic, is wrong again. I am not a bad composer – I’m a very good one though it’s inconvenient to have no one know that but myself!