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[Letter from Maynard Solomon] Author(s): Maynard Solomon
Source: Journal of the American Muslcologlcal Society, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Spring, 1989), pp. 209-218
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological Society Stable URL: http://www.,jstor.org/stable/831426 Accessed: 23-04-2015 15:23 UTC
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similar explanations for Ives's motivations where the evidence is more revealing, but such circumstances may still admit of several interpretations. The evidence on the Washington's Birthday page, for example, includes an obvious retrospective inscription, but this does not necessarily represent an act of deception; indeed, Ives's notations on this page seem motivated by an attempt to clarify, not distort, the chronological record. Similarly, the evidence shows that Ives failed to acknowledge the date of revisions for The Celestial Country, but proving that this was an act of "suppression" requires stronger evidence, such as an obliterated date or a blatant contradiction.
Toward the end of his article, Solomon raises a point that reaches the heart of the issue. He suggests that over a period of "ten or even fifteen years Ives created sketches, outlines, and drafts for many compositional projects . . . but managed to complete very few works" (p. 464). This is a logical explanation of much of Ives's compositional activity from the composer's point of view that renders the notion of a "complete" work inapplicable. He was not composing on a commission or for a specific performance that would require a "finished" product. In those circumstances where he was able to hear some kind of "performance," probably just a reading, this would simply provide the opportunity for him to hear the results of his efforts, and would thus serve as an impetus for further revision and experimentation along similar lines. It is hardly unbelievable that sketches produced under these conditions would generate confusion about chronology.
The basic issue, then, is not whether Ives revised and altered scores, but whether this process was part of the "systematic pattern of falsification" (p. 463) that Solomon describes. It is clear that Ives was inconsistent, that he sometimes obscured facts, and that the circumstances of a creative existence outside the mainstream of the musical establishment promoted impassioned, possibly bitter responses that have clouded the evidentiary trail. But to explain Ives's motivations for these actions requires extensive testing of evidence and full accountability of Ives's entire body of work. Solomon does Ives studies a service by sparking the necessary debate and re-evaluation, even while his own hypotheses only intensify the mystique and amplify the unanswered questions.
J. Philip Lambert Baruch College-C.U.N.Y.
To the Editor of the Journal:
J. Philip Lambert's communication is an exercise in idealization. It seeks to perpetuate the Ives mythology by proposing "alternative explanations" to "a few" of the numerous anomalies, contradictions, and inaccuracies in Ives's writings which I described in "Charles Ives: Some Questions of Veracity." Of course, reasonable people may differ about the significance of the evidence I have presented. But the uncritical multiplication of benign alternatives will not carry us very far and, indeed, could well be indicative of a lack of objectivity.
I will respond briefly to each of Lambert's points. Then I will try to show that the contradictions in Ives's datings may be better understood within the
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context of his attempt to establish his career as a composer of new music. In the process, I will offer some further evidence of fundamental inaccuracies in Ives's datings.
—Psalm 6y. Ives claimed that the work, which he himself dated "1898," was performed by his father, who died in 1894. Lambert proposes to account for the discrepancy by an unsupported conjecture that George Ives may merely have rehearsed a preliminary version of the work. This is difficult to square with Ives's own statements (Memos, pp. 47, 178). And there is no preliminary sketch or version in existence.
—George Ives's Copybook. There is no reason uncritically to accept as fact that Ives's experimental works in the copybook were written—or reached their present form—while he was studying with his father. Two marginal notes confirm that Ives was still entering material in the copybook almost thirty years later: A waltz sketch on p. 82 is preceded by four measures marked "Intro 1921"; and, alongside the "Funeral Slow March" (dated "'87 or '88") on p. 166, is Ives's comment: "Found by mother . . . May 16 1921." Many early entries appear to have been revised at later dates. The copybook contains a wide variety of Ives's handwritings, which will need to be sorted out; sometimes, as in the sketches for "Song for Harvest Season" (pp. 77-79), the "Burlesque Exercise" (p. 98), the "Fugue in Four Keys" (p. 99), and the Burlesques (p. 100), the music appears to be written in a very late hand. The datings and marginal remarks on pages 62, 71, 82, 100, and 166 are most likely retrospective. I do not exclude the possibility that Ives wrote experimental music in his 'teens and early twenties. However, there are sufficient counterindications to such claims that we cannot simply take Ives's word on this matter.
—George Ives's "Letter" to Orrin Barnum. I question its authenticity, not only because it is written in Charles Ives's own hand and in his characteristic style (see, e.g., Memos, pp. 196-97), but because the original has not been produced. It is a surprising suggestion that we ought to accept the letter as authentic, "even if his son did not quote the document precisely, or added words of his own at the end."
—George Ives's "Essay" on Music Theory. This is really an unadorned outline syllabus in elementary music theory, written as an aid in the instruction of beginners. "I take it for granted that you understand notation, i.e., names of notes, system of keys &c—If not, they can be learned without teacher or instrument. If you'll let me know [I] will be glad to show you" (mss., p. 1). It is wholly conventional in its outlook. "Look at the keys of Piano playing and you'll notice there are five notes that are left out in the space of an octave. So that while there are eight (8) notes in the octave of a diatonic scale there should be thirteen if we sounded all the notes we have. These thirteen Tones ... are called the chromatic scale" (mss., p. 7). Clearly George Ives here had no thought of further subdivisions of the scale. Lambert's quotations cannot reasonably be read as advocacy of unconventional theoretical stances. George Ives carefully preserved—and presumably required that his students use —four sets of his own theory-teacher's orthodox lecture notes.
—Works Shown to Horatio Parker. I have remarked on the absence of any reference to new compositions in Ives's letters of 1893 and 1894. To counter this difficulty, Lambert proposes that Ives must have shown to Horatio
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Parker music written prior to 1893. But Ives himself claimed to have written more than two dozen works in 1893 and 1894, none of which are mentioned in the letters. This productivity, in turn, is difficult to credit, because, from the spring of 1893 onward, Ives was away at school, working as a church organist, participating in team sports, and studying intensively to keep his grades up so that he might pass his entrance examinations to Yale. During this period, his father pressed him to dedicate himself wholly to his academic studies. As for "At Parting," I will suggest below that there is no reason to accept Ives's assertion that the song was written when he was in his mid 'teens.
—Washington's Birthday. Lambert attempts to shift the issue from misrepresentation to "clarification." Thus, Ives is said to have written "Hartsdale New York" (an address good for May 1911 to June 1914) over an earlier-written address (good for fall 1917 to spring 1926) only because he wanted to "clarify the origins of the piece." But the alleged origin of the work in 1909 and its rescoring in 1913 is clarified by several other marginal entries; and this notation follows the words "return Chas E. Ives," customarily written to a copyist, strongly suggesting that Ives's real purpose was to obscure the indications that the work was actually scored and copied between 1917 and 1926. Lambert reads the datable addresses in the wrong order: "120 East 22nd Street" was entered first, not second.
—Putnam's Camp. Lambert is apparently unaware that the patch for mm. 107-108 bearing a reference to the presidential election of 1908 was actually composed in late 1929, for Ives added a piano to the scoring only at that time (information from James Sinclair). Thus, Lambert's assertion that, from the handwriting, "we can easily accept Ives's dating" of October 1912, falls away. In fact, Ives's handwriting on the patch is perfectly consistent with his quite unpalsied handwriting on other documents circa 1930, such as the manuscript of Memos (see Memos, illustrations 8-11). Moreover, a draft letter on the score referring to Ives's daughter Edith was probably also written circa 1930. Certainly, inasmuch as she was born in 1914, the letter is inconsistent with Ives's claimed "1912" completion date. The text for "Vote for Names" (written in any event almost entirely in script rather than capital letters) is irrelevant to the date inscribed on Putnam's Camp, for Ives's biting political comments are scarcely limited to the years 1908-1912.
Faced with acknowledged contradictions, Lambert searches for innocuous alternatives. He suggests that the "Election Day 1908" notation is not a dating but merely Ives's free association to the literary program of the piece, a suggestion which he does not elaborate, perhaps because the program describes a boy's idyllic Fourth of July dream (see Memos, p. 84). This is a rather disingenuous suggestion, for in that case the date and the reference to William Howard Taft would be superfluous. As for his optional proposal that Ives may have been recalling the original period of conception, Lambert has forgotten that Ives never elsewhere claimed to have conceived, sketched, or written Putnam's Camp in 1908. Ironically, Lambert has unwittingly opened up a general objection to all of Ives's marginal notations as predicates for dating his works: for if "Election Day 1908" is not to be considered a plain dating of Putnam's Camp why should we regard the score-sketch entry "Whitman's House, Hartsdale, N.Y., Oct. 1912"—or any similar notation
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on other works—as a dating rather than a free association or nostalgic notation?
—The Celestial Country. Lambert does not dispute Yellin's discovery that Ives added the interludes at a later, unacknowledged date, but he claims that the revision "was in some ways consistent with the work's chronology, and would not, therefore, seem worthy of acknowledgement." It is not comforting to learn that Lambert will decide for us which of Ives's revisions are worthy of acknowledgement. Our difficulty is that Ives never acknowledged that many of his most innovative compositions were revised into their final state in the decades after 1920. Although he lists many of his works which were written over long time-spans, Ives's lists specify none whose time-spans extended beyond 1920 or 1921. Indeed, he claimed that he had given up composition before then, a claim we now know to be erroneous. As for The Celestial Country, Ives was much concerned to demonstrate that he was already using advanced techniques in this 1902 cantata. That is why he quotes out of context the Musical Courier's passing reference to "unusual harmonies" and "complicated rhythms" in its review, neglecting to quote the critic's cool judgement: "the work shows undoubted earnestness in study, and talent for composition" {Memos, p. 33 and 33, n. 1). And even apart from the inserted interludes, are we really certain that the heavy revisions of the work are coeval with the 1902 performance? Finally, in pointing to similar chord structures in other works, Lambert accepts as proven what remains to be demonstrated, namely, the dates of those other works.
Even though Lambert does not dispute much of my evidence of Ives's retrospective datings, contradictory or deceptive datings, and undesignated later revisions, he maintains that we ought to continue to take Ives's datings on faith. However, it seems to me that the existence of undisputed evidence that Ives entered wrong dates and datable references on some of his manuscripts should require that we set aside all such notations as premises for fixing the dates of his works. Similarly, we ought to suspend our reliance upon Ives's memos and lists, for they are self-serving and contradictory sources. To establish the dates of commencement and revision of Ives's works, we need to rely upon the traditional methods of historical musicolo-gy—documentary and paper studies, handwriting comparisons, and a detailed analytic reconstruction of the compositional process of each work.
In my earlier paper, I stressed Ives's inner need to deny influence as a primary motivation in his revision of the dates of his compositions. Now, without withdrawing that suggestion, I will stress a more direct motivation —Ives's wish to further his career by asserting his precedence over the great European modernists, including Debussy, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Bartok, Milhaud, and Hindemith. Starting in the mid-1920's, Ives began to broadcast his claims of priority in every variety of modernist innovation, coupled with pronouncements of his isolation from influences and contemporary currents, of his sole reliance upon the instruction of his father (who had nurtured his interest in experimental music), and of his aim to create an American music expressive of national feelings and based on indigenous materials. These claims were initially adumbrated in Ives's article "Some Quarter-Tone Impressions" (1925), which credited his quarter-tone experi-
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ments to his father's notions and contraptions, but the mythology was fully elaborated in a series of articles and program notes by two champions of Ives, beginning in 1927. In the Pro Musica Quarterly for that year, Henry Bellamann described Ives's father as "a ceaseless experimenter in acoustics," whose "researches led him to profound investigations of harmonic formulae"; and in a program note of the same year, he asserted that some of Ives's "larger works written many years ago employed poly tonal and atonal devices, with quarter-tone experiments and harmonic developments, which precede in point of time the innovations of the extreme modernists." Henry Co well's very numerous early writings on Ives insistently sounded the same theme, that Ives "originated polyharmonies and tone clusters and almost every conceivable sort of tonal combinations, dissonances, etc." well before Stravinsky and Schoenberg, who "became world-famous because they originated similar materials" at a later date; similarly, he claimed, Ives deserved priority over Gershwin and Copland for his early use of jazz and ragtime rhythms in serious music (Disques, 1932).
As the 1930's progressed, others, notably John Kirkpatrick, Lawrence Gilman, and Goddard Lieberson, repeated and extended these claims, which tended to grow more extravagant in the retellings. Thus, Kirkpatrick stated that "the Ives family" was treating "polytonality and quartertones with considerable freedom and mastery at a time when European composers were only suspecting their possibilities" (Program Note to Town Hall recital, 28 January 1936). More colorfully, in his famous review of Kirkpatrick's performance of the Concord Sonata, Gilman wrote that Ives had achieved his "incredible ultra-modernism" in the 'nineties, at a time when "Stravinsky was playing marbles" in St. Petersburg, and that Ives's early experiments made "the typical utterances of Schoenberg sound like Haydn sonatas" (New York Herald-Tribune, 21 January 1939). With Gilman's review, and the almost simultaneous feature story on Ives in Time magazine (30 January 1939), the Ives mythology crossed into American cultural folklore.
Time explained Ives's "long obscurity" as stemming from "his horror of publicity." However, it was precisely by way of his personal promotion and supervision that the main journalistic writings about him came into being. In several instances, indeed, the writers were financially obligated to, or subsidized by Ives. Far from being reticent about such journalistic publicity, Ives was responsible for its origination. And, inasmuch as no other person had access to his unpublished scores, he was the source of the flat claims of priority and of the descriptions of the compositions on which that priority supposedly rested. Often, these claims were at their most intemperate in introductions to publications of Ives's music subsidized or controlled by the composer. Indeed, virtually every published assertion of Ives's priority was sanctioned by Ives and is based almost wholly on his own word, his memoranda, lists, and marginalia, as codified in his Memos, which in turn eventually provided the basis for the Cowells's official biography of 1954.
Whether Ives pursued this course simply as a wry teller of tall tales or out of some burdensome necessity is hard to say. In a letter to John J. Becker of 18 May 1937, he described responding to questionnaires as "a nuisance" which must be borne "for the sake of what we stand up for in music." Such things "are necessary," he wrote, "in about the same way that the bellows are
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to the pipe organ—no blow, no music" (Becker Collection, New York Public Library). Ives sometimes took such matters too seriously: his insistence on turning Lucille Fletcher's projected New Yorker profile into a flagrant piece of self-promotion led to the piece's rejection.
The assertions of Ives's precocious ultramodernism are unsupported by written or spoken records contemporaneous with the supposed composition dates of his experimental works, such as: (a) reviews, (b) comments by musicians or listeners, (c) publications, and (d) letters or other writings by Ives himself describing his achievements in such procedures as atonality, polytonality, tonal collage, polyrhythms, or quarter-tone composition. To my knowledge, there is not a single independent reference to the striking modernism of Ives's music by anyone prior to 1920. This is fairly remarkable because, according to Ives, his music—including many of his experimental compositions—had been performed both privately and publicly from 1889 onward. During the next three decades, he claimed, his works had been copied by many skilled copyists and tried out by a variety of artists, ensembles, and orchestras. Moreover, he asserted that his experimental music was heard and played by such music-teachers or composers as William Edward Haesche, Frank A. Fichtl, John C. Griggs, and Horatio Parker; by music-critics such as Max Smith; by professional musicians such as Gustave Bach, Caroline Baker, Ellis Ellsworth Giles, Reber Johnson, Franz Kalten-born, Franz Milcke, and David Talmadge, not to mention numerous amateur musicians. Not one of these musicians ever remarked—either verbally or in writing, either at the time or later—on Ives's pathbreaking accomplishments.
The Ives mythology (or "Ives Legend," as Frank Rossiter calls it) rests on a cluster of works which allegedly anticipated various modernist experiments and innovations. But an examination of many of them reveals all kinds of anomalies, making it difficult to confirm Ives's claimed datings:
—Quarter-tone Chorale for Strings. The original, which Ives placed in 1903, is supposedly lost; an arrangement for two pianos survives, dated "1913-1914" on four of Ives's lists and "1903-1914" on three others. A sheet, originally a rejected title-page of The Celestial Country, containing Ives's diagrams of quarter-tone scales, bears the date "Nov. 14, 1901." The handwriting of the diagrams appears to be post-1920. Kirkpatrick, ignoring Ives's indications, dates this: "say 1923-24."
—Harvest Home Chorales. The date "1897" was added by Ives to a photostatic positive more than three decades after that date. Elsewhere he offered a wide variety of datings, from "dates uncertain" to "1898" to "before 1902" to several dates of "1912," one of which is altered to "1902."
—"Song for Harvest Season." Although Ives claimed that this song, with a brilliantly conceived fugal accompaniment in four different keys, was one of his earliest and most important songs, dating it "1893" or "1894," lt was omitted from the 114 Songs (1922) and published only in Thirty-Four Songs (1933). The final ink score is in a late hand; sketches for mm. 1-22 survive in George Ives's copybook, but Ives's claim that he wrote the song while studying counterpoint with his father cannot be substantiated. Given the song's assured contrapuntal technique, it is hard to understand the fledgling nature of Ives's surviving counterpoint studies for Horatio Parker in 1897-1898.
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—"At Parting." Dated "1888" and "1889." This is another "early" song inexplicably omitted from 114 Songs and published in 1933. (The third such omission is "Soliloquy," a remarkable "anticipation" of the Second Viennese School.) The autograph bears no resemblance to Ives's early handwriting.
—Overture and March "1776". An early "source" of Ives's polyrhythmic, pre-Stravinsky "piano-drum writing," the manuscript is dated December 1903 to 4 July 1904. However, the polyrhythmic piano-drum lines are a later revision; they and Ives's instructions for their performance are squeezed in after every third system—at the bottom of each page.
—The Circus Band. This was supposedly written in 1894, Dut a 1020 "things-to-do" memorandum (Charles Ives Papers, Music Library of Yale University, MSS 14/Box 24/11) shows that Ives intended to "finish and copy" the work in the latter year.
Furthermore, none of the alleged performances of Ives's experimental early works can be independently confirmed. For example:
—American Woods Overture. Supposedly performed by George Ives's band in 1889 at the Wooster House Bandstand. Kirkpatrick searched the band programs and Danbury press and found no record of a performance. Nor is there any record of a performance, by Billy Hicks and others named on the score, during Ives's Yale years.
—Concord Sonata. Ives claimed that he performed it in the spring of 1914 at a New York church. Kirkpatrick writes, "Mrs. Ives has no definite recollection . . . nor does the church have any record of it" {Memos, p. 201, n). According to a memo supposedly written in 1913, Ives played the sonata for critic Max Smith in 1912 (Memos, pp. 186—88). But the memo is written on the flyleaves of a copy of the first edition of the sonata, which was not published until 1921. Was Ives merely transcribing a previously composed memo? Or was he retroactively drafting a diary entry to establish a 1912 performance date for the Concord Sonata}
—Easter Carol. On the score, Ives referred to a performance on "Easter Ap 1895 New Haven Ct." On another ink copy, he wrote, "Sung Easter, Baptist Ch Danbury, Apr. 1892. Central Pres Ch. NY Easter 1902." Kirkpatrick was unable to verify any of these performances. Elsewhere, concerning Ives's "1895" date, Kirkpatrick comments dryly: "certainly later" (Memos, p. 255).
—"At Parting." Ives maintained that the song was performed by Mrs. Caroline (Carrie) Baker at a Danbury concert of 11 November 1888, but no concert of that date is mentioned in the Danbury News. Ives refers to another concert performance of the song by Mrs. Baker, with himself at the piano, on 8 February 1889 in Brewster; perhaps this was Mrs. Baker's concert of that date in New Canaan, but the program of her concert does not include "At Parting" or list Ives as the accompanist. Kirkpatrick hazards that "At Parting" may have been an encore.
—Variations on America. "Organ fantasia . . . played in 1891-92 in organ recitals in Danbury and Brewster, N.Y." (Memos, p. 38). Father "even let me try out 'two keys to once' . . . but ... it made the boys laugh" (Memos, p. 115). On the score is written: "Concert Brewster NY July 4 1891." Kirkpatrick could not find any mention of these performances in the press.
—Country Band March. Dated "1902" and "1903" (the latter retrospectively entered on a photostatic positive) on the score, the autograph also contains a
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reference to a performance in late 1905 and to jesting remarks by the performers. There is no independent evidence of such a performance.
—"Song for Harvest Season." It cannot be confirmed that this was performed at Danbury Baptist Church by Mrs. Thomas Smyth in the summer of 1893 or ^94- No early performing version exists.
—Overture and March "ijjG\ A memo on the score gives detailed instructions on playing the piano-drum parts and refers also to "Bart's mandolin." No evidence supports Ives's suggestion that it was performed or rehearsed in 1904.
The discussion of the Ives chronology has already moved well beyond apologetics and the multiplication of benign interpretations. In a recent paper (Newsletter of the Institute for Studies in American Music, Nov. 1988) J. Peter Burkholder, though unwilling to conclude that the Ives chronology requires drastic revision, demonstrates that, until 1920, both in his music and in Essays Before a Sonata, Ives firmly situated his work within the European tradition and was not reluctant to acknowledge influence, however much he desired even then to transcend his models. Next, Burkholder calls attention to the "striking inversion" in Ives's evaluation of his own music by the time he wrote Memos, where the very pieces for which he had attempted to obtain performances before 1918 are scarcely discussed while his musical experiments "are discussed at disproportionate length." Clearly, this inversion coincides precisely with the promulgation of the Ives mythology, in which Ives staked out his claims of priority and commenced, in Burkholder's phrase, "to disinherit himself from European music."
I believe that we now must seriously entertain the possibility that some of Ives's major works were mainly, or even wholly, composed after 1920. In a letter of 4 July 1921 to Henry Bellamann, Ives listed his works as: two piano sonatas, "some early organ fugues, cantatas, etc; 4 violin sonatas; 3 symphonies; 2 suites for orchestra; 1 string quartet; and about 250 songs" (Charles Ives Papers, Music Library of Yale University, MSS 14/Box 27/1). A preliminary draft of this letter showed "3" violin sonatas corrected to "4" and "200" songs corrected to "250"; in the draft Ives also listed and then canceled: "a good many anthems, hymns etc, and even pieces for brass band . . . most of which are dead & buried." The most striking omissions, of course, are of the fourth symphony, the second string quartet, the piano trio, and at least two overtures; but some twenty other works are also missing, including most of the ultramodern works on which Ives's reputation was largely founded. It may be argued that Ives, in 1921, merely provided his correspondent with a quick list of major works in traditional forms, though this could not account for the omission of such works as the fourth symphony and the second string quartet. Six years later, Bellamann published, with Ives's approval, an equally surprising list in his article in Pro Musica Quarterly: it is essentially the same as the 1921 list, but now includes four symphonies and the three quarter-tone pieces. Against the contention that this, too, may have been merely a selective listing, is Ives's ratification of this list in his letter of 30 June 1930 to John Tasker Howard; responding to the critic's inquiry about
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what works he had composed, he replied: "See list of compositions at the end of an article about my music by Henry Bellamann in Pro Musica Quarterly, March 1927" {Memos, p. 238).
New evidence continues to emerge which is in direct conflict with Ives's "official" datings. For example, the First Piano Sonata is dated "1902-1909" and "1902-1910" in the lists; in Memos, Ives wrote, "it was finished in 1909 or 1910," making sure to call attention to his early use of ragtime rhythms {Memos, pp. 74-75). But his letter to Bellamann of 4 July 1921 told a different story: "The first piano sonata, which you kindly ask about, was written about 6 or 7 years ago," thus placing the work in about 1914 or 1915. (The draft letter showed "7 or 8 years," canceled and changed to "6 or 7 years.") Ives did not mention an extended period of gestation. Clearly, we now also have to be concerned about the date of the Concord Sonata, supposedly "composed mostly in 1909 and 1910," completed by 1912 (with minor revisions to the last movement in 1915), for it is scarcely likely that Ives's second sonata could have preceded his first. Indeed, Kirkpatrick has concluded that the first publication in 1921 must be taken "as the norm, with variants from other sources, both before and after, but near (except in a few places where he finally found the right solution much later)" (letter to the author, 11 April 1987).
Both sonatas were substantially revised at later dates. There exist fourteen separate corrected copies of the first edition of Concord; and George Roberts, who copied the score for the second edition, recalled that "every time I went there it was new. The printers were on his neck all the time. He used to laugh about it. He didn't care; he was in no hurry, and he always had something new to put in" (Pedis, p. 186). In 1936, Ives sent to Lou Harrison a photostat copy (made ca. 1932) of the first sonata, containing numerous revisions entered prior to that date which were incorporated into the published edition in 1954; and on his own photostat copy Ives made many additional changes after 1936. Thus, both the commencement and completion dates for the sonata are inaccurate by a wide margin.
Elliott Carter wrote recently: "I do think that Ives has not been well served by those who have been taken in by the myth he himself created," adding, "in the U.S. this is the only way, as far as I can see, to become a 'great' during these years—quality is, of course, beside the point—" (letter to the author, 6 May 1988). The entrenchment of the Ives mythology, first within avant-garde and music publications and later in the commercial press, accelerated the process by which his music was heard, published, and written about. But, whatever its success in promoting a fair hearing for Ives, the mythology has become an impediment to the appreciation of his music. Those who are unwilling to face the issue of veracity in Ives's datings and biography are locked in an attitude of reverence which prevents Ives from being understood either in context or as a profound American musical innovator, from being opened to a world perspective instead of a protective, parochial one. We presently hear Ives through a distorted prism, as a pioneer eccentric who created an American modernist music out of wholly indigenous materials, free of foreign contamination. It is this mythology, with its nationalist
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undercurrent, that makes it difficult—perhaps impossible—to hear his music free of irrelevant interventions, independently of such issues as priority and modernism.
A revised chronology may tell us how Ives and his music are rooted in and interact with currents in late romanticism and twentieth-century modernism. We may eventually come to see Ives as an active collaborator in an important new-music project rather than as an isolated primitive. We may come to see him as an artist whose quest for a personal voice was at times conducted in physical solitude but in intense awareness of stylistic developments from other quarters, as a composer who went through the usual stages of apprenticeship, imitation, and experimentation before arriving at a personal synthesis of pre-existent styles and techniques. This will surely affect our perception of his works. But that perception will no longer be based on questionable historical and ideological assumptions. Ives's stature as a major composer has long been assured. His works can make their way without the encumbrance of the Ives mythology.
Maynard Solomon New York, NY
To the Editor of the Journal:
Readers of Robert Levin's review of my book on Mozart Ornamentation and Improvisation (this Journal 41 [1988], 355-68) might be interested to learn that a detailed response will be forthcoming as a chapter of my New Essays in Performance Practice, which UMI Research Press will publish in late summer 1989.
Frederick Neumann Richmond, VA
To the Editor of the Journal:
I am currently preparing a supplement to Otto Erich Deutsch's Mozart: A Documentary Biography; publication is scheduled for 1991. To this end, I would be grateful to hear from anyone who has found new documents or who has relevant information concerning the interpretation of documents already known. All discoveries will, of course, be acknowledged in the published volume. Contributions can be sent to me at: Department of Music, New York University, 268 Waverly Building, Washington Square, New York, NY 10003.
Cliff Eisen New York University
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