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9780252037498 Academic Inspection Copy

Charles Ives in the Mirror

American Histories of an Iconic Composer
  • ISBN-13: 9780252037498
  • Publisher: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
    Imprint: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
  • By David C Paul
  • Price: AUD $102.00
  • Stock: 0 in stock
  • Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
  • Local release date: 14/05/2013
  • Format: Hardback 312 pages Weight: 0g
  • Categories: Music [AV]
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In this sweeping survey of intellectual and musical history, David C. Paul tells the new story of how the music of American composer Charles Ives (1874-1954) was shaped by shifting conceptions of American identity within and outside of musical culture. Paul focuses on the critics, composers, performers, and scholars whose contributions were most influential in shaping the critical discourse on Ives, many of them marquee names of American musical culture themselves, including Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, and Leonard Bernstein. Paul explores both how Ives positioned his music amid changing philosophical and aesthetic currents and how others interpreted his contributions to American music. Although Ives's initial efforts to find a public in the early twenties attracted a few devotees, the resurgence of interest in the American literary past during the thirties made a concert staple of his ''Concord'' Sonata, a work dedicated to nineteenth-century transcendentalist writers. Paul shows how Ives was subsequently deployed as an icon of American freedom during the early Cold War period and how he came to be instigated at the head of a line of ''American maverick'' composers. Paul also examines why a recent cadre of scholars has beset the composer with Gilded Age social anxieties. David C. Paul is an assistant professor of musicology and theory at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
''By virtue of its depth of insight, its wide remit, and its succinct yet highly detailed presentation, this remarkable book is a considerable addition to the existing scholarship on this most fascinating of musical figures.'' David Nicholls, author of John Cage ''Charles Ives in the Mirror is a reception history, not a biography; he wants to investigate how Ives 'has been imagined by the critics, performers and scholars who have been moved to speak or write about him.' As a music writer who has himself been moved to write about Ives, I appreciate Paul's artfully chosen word 'imagine'... the depth of Paul's historical perspective speaks for itself.'' - Philip Clark, Gramophone, September 2013
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