The Music of Charles Ives

With this innovative analysis of the music of Charles Ives, Philip Lambert fills a significant gap in the literature on one of Americas most important composers. Lambert offers the first large-scale theoretical study of Ivess repertoire, encompassing major works in all genres. He argues that systematic techniques governed Ivess compositional language and thinking about music, even in his unconventional and apparently unstructured pieces. He portrays Ives as a composer of great diversity and complexity who nevertheless held to a single artistic vision. Using modes of analysis for post-tonal music and approaches devised specifically for the study of Ives as well, the author explains the origin, evolution, and culmination of Ivess systematic methods. He discusses important aspects of the composers early training, the relation between Ivess experimental and his concert music, Ivess fugal and canonic techniques as the basis for his systematic music, his paradigms of procedure and transformation, and pitch relations in Ivess music, particularly the unfinished Universe Symphony. Lambert refutes the popular image of Ives as a highly eccentric composer haphazardly casting about for arbitrarily regulated ways of generating musical material and instead portrays him as a keenly determined and resourceful artist who gradually discovered ever more powerful tools for creating remarkably original music.