A Union of Diversities: Style in the Music of Charles Ives - Hardcover

Starr, Larry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0028724658 ISBN 13: 9780028724652

Publisher: Schirmer Books, 1992

Synopsis

From the publication of Henry and Sidney Cowell's pioneering Charles Ives and His Music to J. Peter Burkholder's influential Charles Ives: The Ideas behind the Music, music scholars have succeeded in reassessing Ives's broad significance in twentieth-century American music. Yet, even as the composer's works have become the subject of intensive critical debate, careful analyses of his music have increasingly become inaccessible to all but Ives specialists. In A Union of Diversities, Larry Starr offers a new understanding of Ives's extraordinary music based on the fundamental conviction that Ives need not be a specialist's composer.
Starr argues that, far from being an eccentric and musically indifferent composer, Ives was genuinely engaged with the most serious and original aesthetic issues of style and coherence of his day. The key to unlocking what his music is about is style: specifically, the heterogeneity of style within a single work. Stylistic heterogeneity shatters our traditional musical expectations and simultaneously creates challenging and unprecedented expressive experiences.
Using as examples Ives's incredibly diverse song literature and selected orchestral works, Starr offers a fascinating overview of the composer's complex approaches to musical style. In such well-known songs as "Tom Sails Away," "General William Booth Enters Into Heaven," and "Majority," as well as such orchestral works as "Decoration Day," Ives's imaginative use of musical materials forms distinct layers that either create new composite song styles or emphasize multiplicity. Some songs, such as "Ann Street," describe physical journeys; others, such as "The Things Our Fathers Loved," evoke "mental journeys" or the process of memory. Ives's employment of musical style in these works, while appearing to disrupt traditionally conceived continuity and unity, actually creates continuity and unity on other levels of perception. The fascinating richness and ambiguities built into his works suggest complexities of perspective long associated with the visual arts and modern literature.
Starr does not propose a single system for analyzing the music of Ives, but rather a general procedure based on the composer's approach to his music. For Starr, "Ives was the most personal and idiosyncratic of composers, yet it was his very fidelity to his own unique conception of musical substance which led to a body of work that has come to be so profoundly meaningful and challenging to others."

About this title

Synopsis:

In "A union of diversities", Larry Starr offers a new appreciation of Ives's extraordinary music, based on his firm conviction that Ives need not be solely a specialist's composer. He argues that Ives's music reveals the composer's genuine engagement with the most serious aesthetic issues of style and coherence of his day. Further, he shows that style itself is the key to unlocking what the music is about, and specifically the heterogeneity of musical style within a single work. Stylistic heterogeneity shatters our traditional musical expectations and creates challenging expressive experiences.

About this edition

• Publisher: Schirmer Books
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0028724658
• ISBN 13: 9780028724652
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224