Conference Agenda

The Charles Ives Society was founded in 1973 through a fund established by Harmony Twichell Ives "for furtherance of the publication and performance of the music and other works of . . . Charles E. Ives." Initially led by pianist John Kirkpatrick, the Society focused on creating critical editions rather than strict diplomatic facsimiles, allowing for clearer performances of Ives's music. Kirkpatrick's editorial practices, documented in Drew Massey’s book John Kirkpatrick, American Music, and the Printed Page, involved adding barlines and adjusting accidentals to fit a diatonic scheme. Over the years, the Society has shifted towards emphasizing primary manuscript sources, evolving its editorial approach through discussions with editors, publishers, and engravers about Urtext principles, as Ives himself valued his unfinished works.

In 2024, coinciding with Ives’s sesquicentennial, many of his works will enter the public domain. Leading up to this milestone, the Society has prepared to publish Ives’s entire catalogue. Significant projects include the critical and performance editions of the Fourth Symphony, for which new notation software was developed, and the three-volume The Shorter Piano Works of Charles E. Ives.

My presentation will argue that to sustain Ives’s legacy beyond 2025, the Society should build on past achievements while adopting practices from other composer-focused organizations. This includes publishing accessible scholarly editions, transforming its website into a comprehensive research hub with bibliography, discography, and archival resources, and leveraging multimedia. Notable initiatives, such as thirteen commentaries from The Ives Studio at The American Academy of Arts & Letters and three video panel discussions on topics like improvisation and Ives’s influence take steps toward this goal, featuring interdisciplinary contributions from musicologists, performers, and composers.

By implementing these strategies, the Society can ensure that Ives’s manuscripts and palimpsests thrive in scholarship and performances that honor their rich, layered history.

Charles Ives’s music has amused, inspired, challenged, perplexed, and dismayed listeners, performers, and scholars since it first resounded in churches and college hangouts in the 1890s. From accusations of "hogging all the keys," to writing songs that cannot be sung, and instrumental works that needed multiple conductors to control their hydra-headed rhythmic worlds, Ives and his music have provoked derision, confusion, and ecstasy in seeming equal measure. In the twenty-first century, they have prompted additional questions and responses.

In 1920, Ives published his magnum opus solo keyboard work, the Second Pianoforte Sonata: Concord, Mass. 1840-1860. Titles of the four movements commemorated famous transcendentalists, Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau, while the title of the larger sonata privileged the place, Concord, Massachusetts, and a specific time, the years leading up to the Civil War. The piece is a showcase for Ives’s eclectic borrowing practices with references to hymns, patriotic songs, popular music, and Beethoven, Debussy, and Wagner. But it is the “Thoreau” movement, with its prominent quotation of a brief passage from the chorus of Stephen Foster’s 1852 minstrel song “Massa’s in the Cold, Cold Ground,” that makes it additionally problematic. Especially when the Sonata’s centennial celebrations coincided with the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and a reinvigorated Black Lives Matter movement.

Ives referenced “Massa” more than any of the six Foster melodies he borrowed: nineteen pieces in all. Beyond memorializing his father George, for whom it was a favorite, what purpose did so many citations serve? Is their presence in a number of works associated with war important? I propose that in the “Thoreau” movement, “Massa” allowed Ives to conjure seldom-acknowledged aspects of Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden: the writer’s awareness of the formerly enslaved who had lived there, and the physical reminders of their homes that abutted his own. Ives composes the continuing resonances of slavery. Referencing “Massa’s” recording history, and scholarship by J. Peter Burkholder, Matthew Morrison, and bell hooks, I argue for the value of confronting discomforting works in our time.

Charles Ives’s multigenre works often feature what Robin James (2016) portrays as a commitment to purity. Indeed, Ives’s mature instrumental works frequently display a textural and contrapuntal complexity that arises in part via the super- or juxtaposition of pure and discrete genres, enforcing their boundaries and reflecting the hegemonic, discriminatory ideals of an American milieu that decreed identities remain “separate but equal” (Kramer 2002; 2023). Often, Ives seems keenly interested in such separateness, suggesting that to hear stylistic interactions and what they signify, we must first hear genres as crystalline, uncontaminated, distinct.

However, in the more intimate sites of Ives’s songs, especially those that lack an explicitly pictorial or representative goal, multiple genres and their associated stylistic identities are sometimes blended in one. An apt example is Ives’s 1921 “Hymn,” a short song whose generic hybridity belies its simple title. A careful listening to the “Hymn” invites the basic question What is that? Is it really a hymn? Or an art song? Is it a dramatic recitative? A popular song? Resisting this either/or taxonomic impulse, I demonstrate instead how multiple genres occupy the same textural and contrapuntal space, borrowing something like Bruno Alcalde’s (2022) “coexistence” mixture strategy to explore their interactions and building on earlier studies in Ives’s stylistic adventurism (Starr 1992).

Reading Ives retrospectively from the vantage point of 2025 in this way positions him as an early participant in the post-genre. Synthesizing James’s (2016) argument with Jesús Martín-Barbero’s (1993), we might understand genre as a “strategy of identity” and the post-genre as a strategy that critiques the fixedness of identity. In his “Hymn” and other post-generic spaces, Ives launches such a critique, where his integration of genres from Western art song, popular musics, and Protestant hymnody becomes an integration of his overlapping identities, positionality, and participation in the musicking communities from which these genres are sourced—as opposed to those in which he cannot be read as a legitimate actor (e.g., ragtime). Understanding Ives’s place in the post-genre thus provides a relevant case study as the twenty-first century continues to reconsider its ontologies of music and personal identity.

No composer had a more complex and influential relationship with Charles Ives than Elliott Carter. Scholars such as Schiff (1998), Bernard (2009), and Thurmaier (2013) have examined Carter’s ambivalent inheritance from Ives, highlighting his admiration for Ives’s personality and temporal innovations alongside his persistent unease with Ives’s approach to musical borrowing. During the 1974 Ives Centennial, Carter’s Brass Quintet was premiered on Ives’s birthday, October 20, alongside Ives’s Second String Quartet and From the Steeples and the Mountains. This work adopts Ives’s technique of what I call “multiple musical identities” (MMI), a concept employed in his Second String Quartet—a technique that may represent Ives’s most enduring influence on Carter. I argue that Carter’s use of MMI in the quintet composed in anticipation of the Ives festivities offers a lens through which to view Ives’s bifurcated legacy in 2025 as both a romantic and a modernist.

MMI, a technique in which ensemble members embody distinct emotions or are assigned specific musical features such as intervals or groupings emerged in Carter’s Second and Third String Quartets and recurred in numerous later works. While scholars like Mead (2016) and Link (2019) have noted possible inspiration from Ives’s Second String Quartet, their analyses focus on Carter’s formalist explorations of pitch and rhythm. Building on their work, I interpret the Brass Quintet as an extension of Ives’s concept of communication (or lack thereof) between players, recalling Ives’s description of a quartet that “converse[s], discuss[es], argue[s], fight[s], shake[s] hands, shut[s] up—then walk[s] up the mountainside to view the firmament.” Carter, by contrast, refines and systematizes this approach: he organizes the quintet into smaller, interval-based subgroups (duos, trios), juxtaposed with quodlibet sections that sound improvisatory yet are intricately composed.

Carter’s engagement with MMI in the Brass Quintet can be read as both homage to and critique of Ives, embracing his model while subjecting it to rigorous formal control. Ultimately, Carter’s conflicted view of Ives—romantic yet modern, innovative yet unsystematic, original yet derivative—still encapsulates the challenges of interpreting Ives’s music today, offering insights into how his work continues to be received and understood.

Ives wrote copious autobiographical documents and program notes, which contain dozens of examples of misogynistic, disturbing language. For example, on more than one occasion, Ives described “emasculated” or “effeminate” music, evoking terms such as “pansys,” [sic] “lily-pads,” “old ladies,” “pussy-boys” and “musical pussies” to describe men who wrote or listened to such music in his body of written works (e.g., Memos 1971, and Essays Before a Sonata 1920).

In this talk, I will discuss some of Ives’s problematically gendered and misogynistic language. First, I will provide some examples of such language. I will briefly contextualize Ives’s gendered writings with the conclusions that other scholars such as Frank Rossiter, Stuart Feder, Maynard Solomon, Judith Tick, and J. Peter Burkholder have come to about them. Next, I will outline my own thoughts on how 21st-century scholarship can potentially use Ives’s gendered dichotomies as a foundation for musical analysis. I will examine one of Ives’s songs, “The Things Our Fathers Loved,” (1917) showing how we could interpret this song as containing a masculine/feminine opposition and that this opposition can ground a plurality of readings of the work (Hatten 1994). This opposition can be demonstrated with the song’s text, which Ives himself wrote, as well as with the song’s primary and secondary musical parameters (Meyer 1992), in addition to the song’s musical borrowings and intertexts. In one reading, I will surmise that the song’s masculine ending has triumphed over the feminine opening, and will argue that its ending could be read in a sexually brutal or violent manner (McClary 1994). After I problematize this reading, I will show in a second interpretation how one could view the song as more unified, using prolongational analysis as my analytical foundation. In this view, the song takes on a transformative quality near its ending, leading to a conclusion that could be heard as quasi-apotheotic.

This presentation offers a heuristic interpretation of “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” as a work of art celebrating the consummation of sexual/spiritual love between Charles Ives and his new bride Harmony. It builds on the consensus among scholars that Ives’s new period of compositional maturity coincides with his marriage, and it rests on the importance of the publication of love letters between Charles and Harmony in 2008 as part of the argument. The “transmogrification,” to use Ives’s term, of the instrumental work to song highlights the stature of the text by Robert Underwood Johnson, one of the few poets whose lyrics Ives used multiple times. Johnson’s poem deserves more attention for its complex underlying themes, including a reference to “Aphrodite’s tresses.” If only as a foil for Ives’s style, Johnson’s appeal to the composer once again underscores how Ives’s literary conservatism coincided with his stylistic innovation. (As an important cultural taste-maker and institution builder in his position as the editor of Century Magazine, Johnson deserves some attention on his own.)

Charles Ives was a passionate man. Ives’s scholarship has long engaged with the passionate Ives through “gender,” to be sure, but the theme of “sexuality” is notable for its absence.. Perhaps Ives, who said so much about one, allowed his music to speak for the other. And further, sometimes a leap into speculation has its virtues: here my presentation will draw on Tina Packer’s theatrical tour-de-force about the onset of maturity in Shakespeare in her study The Women of Will. She writes in her chapter titled “The Sexual Merges with the Spiritual: New Knowledge, of the link between sexual love and spirituality, asking “What is passion, sexual/psychic passion?…It has its own overwhelming volition…and thus is feared by people in power who want to reinforce the norms of society. Transgression is its journey.” Onward she presses to her conclusion that for Shakespeare it led to his deepest understanding of spiritual love as well. How relevant this could be for Charles Ives as composer is worth some reflection.