In celebration (yet again) of the Ives Sesquicentenary, I write for the online digital magazine Persuasion:
“Of the crises today afflicting the fractured American experience, the least acknowledged and understood is an erosion of the American arts correlating with eroding cultural memory. Never before have Americans elected a president as divorced from historical awareness as Donald Trump. If Charles Ives is the supreme creative genius of American classical music, it’s partly because, more than any other American composer of symphonies and sonatas, he is a custodian of the American past. A product of Danbury, a self-made Connecticut Yankee, he created a bracing New World idiom steeped in the New England Transcendentalists, in the Civil War, in smalltown patriotic celebrations. His improvisatory bravado, espousing the ‘unfinished,’ equally links to such ragged literary icons as Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman.”
To read the whole piece, click here.
To watch my Ives film documentary, click here.
Joe, why do you suppose his music is so rarely performed these days? I remember the great flurry of activity surrounding his centennial years, 1974.