Charles Ives: A Life with Music - Softcover

Swafford, Jan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393317196 ISBN 13: 9780393317190

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998

Synopsis

Jan Swafford's colorful biography first unfolds in Ives's Connecticut hometown of Danbury, then follows Ives to Yale and on to his years in New York, where he began his double career as composer and insurance executive. The Charles Ives that emerges from Swafford's story is a precocious, well-trained musician, a brilliant if mercurial thinker about art and life, and an experimenter in the spirit of Edison and the Wright brothers.

About this title

Review:

First-rate. . . . Thoughtful, witty, instructive, this is one of the best biographies in recent memory, as warm and strangely inspiring as the man and the music it describes.

Starred Review. A superb writer. . . . [Swafford has] brought the old curmudgeon . . . to vivid life, at once a comic and a tragic figure and in terms of his significance in American artistic life, on the level of Twain or Whitman.

Synopsis:

In his lifetime, Charles Ives and his music were denounced and ridiculed, but in this book he emerges as a precocious, well-trained musician, an experimenter, and a brilliant thinker about art and life. The author of this study uses the apparent contradictions of Ives' life to explain his music.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0393317196
• ISBN 13: 9780393317190
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 546