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Charles Ives's Concord: Essays after a Sonata

Online ISBN:
9780252099366
Print ISBN:
9780252040856
Publisher:
University of Illinois Press
Book

Charles Ives's Concord: Essays after a Sonata

Kyle Gann
Kyle Gann
Bard College
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Published:
15 May 2017
Online ISBN:
9780252099366
Print ISBN:
9780252040856
Publisher:
University of Illinois Press

Abstract

In January 1921, New York insurance company executive Charles Ives mailed self-published scores of a piano sonata he had written to 200 strangers. Unprecedentedly complex and modern beyond any music the recipients had seen before, the piece was subtitled “Concord, Mass., 1840-1860,” and the four sonata movements were named for American authors: “Emerson,” “Hawthorne,” “The Alcotts,” “Thoreau.” Ridiculed in the press at first, the Concord Sonata gained admirers (including composers like Copland and Gershwin and writers like Henry Bellamann), and when finally given its complete world premiere by John Kirkpatrick in 1939, it was hailed as “the greatest music composed by an American.” The piece is so complex that it has never been fully analyzed before, and this book is the first to explore and detail its methods on every page. Likewise, Ives wrote a book to accompany the sonata, titled Essays Before a Sonata, purporting to explain his aesthetic thinking, and no one has ever before seriously examined Ives’s aesthetic through-argument.

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