The Music of Charles Ives: Unending Variations on America

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Foreword
Acknowledgments
Timeline
Introduction
Chapter 1: A Most Unusual Career, and a Recital of Songs
Memories * The Circus Band * Walking * The Cage * Down East * General William Booth Enters into Heaven
Chapter 2: An American Musical Childhood
Holiday Quickstep * Variations on "America"
Chapter 3: Apprenticeship
Feldeinsamkeit * Ich grolle nicht * Symphony No. 1 in D Minor
Chapter 4: Weaving the Threads
String Quartet No. 1 * Psalm 67 * Yale-Princeton Football Game
Chapter 5: Seeking and Finding
Central Park in the Dark * The Unanswered Question
Chapter 6: Synthesizing American and European Music
Symphony No. 2
Chapter 7: A New Form
Symphony No. 3: The Camp Meeting * The Violin Sonatas
Chapter 8: American Holidays
A Symphony: New England Holidays
Chapter 9: American Histories
Orchestral Set No. 1: Three Places in New England * Orchestral Set No. 2
Chapter 10: American Literature
Piano Sonata No. 2: Concord, Mass., 1840-1860
Chapter 11: Transcendent Journeys
String Quartet No. 2 * Symphony No. 4
Chapter 12: Collecting Songs, and Late Works
114 Songs * Psalm 90
Epilogue
Selected Reading
Selected Listening
About the Author

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Charles Ives is widely regarded as the first, great American composer of classical music. But listening to his music is an adventure-hearing how a piece begins may not prepare you for what comes next, or how it ends. Knowing one Ives piece may not prepare you for another.

Award-winning music historian J. Peter Burkholder provides an introduction to the composer's diverse musical output and unusual career to readers of any background, discussing about thirty of the best and most characteristic pieces framed with biographical sketches. Burkholder shows how Ives mastered each tradition he encountered: from American popular music to classical European genres, from Protestant church music to his own unique experimental idiom, and interweaving elements from all these traditions in the astonishing works of his maturity.

Burkholder provides compelling and accessible walkthroughs of select pieces, bringing the music alive and guiding listeners to a newfound appreciation of the composer. Ultimately, it reveals that there is an Ives piece for everyone

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