A Comprehensive Summary And Analysis Of Essays Before A Sonata By Charles Ives

A Comprehensive Summary and Analysis of Essays Before A Sonata by Charles Ives

Charles Ives' “Essays Before a Sonata” serves as a profound exploration of the philosophical and artistic underpinnings of his second piano sonata, “Concord, Mass., 1845.” The essays delve into the nature of music, its capacity for representation, and the influence of transcendentalism on artistic expression. Ives grapples with the complexities of translating non-musical ideas into musical terms and examines the lives and philosophies of key figures associated with Concord, Massachusetts: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Alcott family, and Henry David Thoreau. This summary will provide a deep analysis of the core concepts within Ives' work.

Charles Ives

This comprehensive work reflects the renewed interest and recognition of Charles Ives's music, and it gathers into one volume previously scattered and hard-to-find material by and about the composer. The musical and historical significance of one of America's most famous twentieth-century composers is represented in a substantively annotated, discerning and critical bibliography that includes a foreword by the noted Ives scholar, J. Peter Burkholder. The book begins with an explanation of the scope, organization, and rationale of the material presented and provides an overview and discussion of the current status of Ives scholarship. This is followed by a biographical sketch, a catalog of works and performances, and a complete discography of all recordings in print as of 1985. The bibliography consists of four major sections devoted to collections and catalogs, biographical and aesthetic articles, and reviews and critical evaluations of Ives and his contemporaries; the final section, on Ive's work, is arranged according to the genres of orchestral and band music, chamber music, keyboard music, choral and partsongs, and songs, following John Kirkpatrick's widely used manuscript categorization. The annotations on several hundred books, essays, and reviews offer a historical perspective of the critical reception of Ives's music, tracing its development from obscurity to crusade to fad, to its present secure place in the repertoire. The extensive appendixes and indexes provide, in a conveniently centralized format, lists of materials not found in standard indexes or cited in earlier studies; they make accessible many items that appear in relatively obscure journals or archives. This definitive sourcebook will greatly facilitate further study and inspire new research on one of today's most controversial musical figures. It will be of great interest to musicologists, Ives scholars, and students of twentieth-century American music.

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