From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Charles Ives: A Life With Music |
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| Author: | Jan Swafford |
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| Publisher: | W. W. Norton & Company |
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This penetrating study illuminates the life and works of the enigmatic composer/insurance executive Charles Ives, whose experimental works profoundly influenced the course of American classical music in the twentieth century. In his rich and colorful biography, Jan Swafford, himself an established composer, looks at this towering, paradoxical figure and finds the consistencies lying beneath the protean surface. Using what he calls an “Ivesian” approach, Swafford sees the music and the life as forming a single story; one that is firmly rooted in Ives’s Yankee background. Thus the book unfolds with a brief history of Ives’s Connecticut hometown of Danbury, then describes Civil War band music, and finally draws a fascinating portrait of George Ives, Charles’s remarkable father and musical mentor. We follow Ives to Yale and then to his early years in New York, as he becomes at once a composer of conventional church anthems, an unprecedented innovator in musical technique, and a rising insurance executive. After skillfully evoking the sights and sounds that influenced the composer and his music, Swafford weaves together Ives the businessman and Ives the musical explorer, always keeping the discussion of the works at a nontechnical level.
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Reviews
Amazon.com
This is a scholarly assessment of the American composer Charles Ives, whose life and work have remained enigmatic since his death in 1954. A successful insurance executive in Hartford, Connecticut, Ives used a considerable part of his tidy income to promote serious modern music, and despite his day job maintained a prolific output of scores himself. He was a robustly opinionated and confident individual who eschewed easy listening; his atonal works were considered almost un-American. Yet he also sought recognition that just eluded him in his lifetime. Ives is increasingly known around the world. Jan Swafford, himself a composer, should help win even more interest with this sympathetic biography.
