Product Description
The essays in Ives Studies are concerned with Charles Ives (1874SH1954), an American composer of symphonic, choral, and chamber music who was an early pioneer of twentieth-century musical modernism. Ten leading scholars address issues that have been at the forefront of a recent surge in Ives scholarship, including the hotly debated chronology of his work, the nature of his compositional philosophy and style, and his place in music history. ... Read more

Product Description
A primary source book on Charles E. Ives, this volume presents most of the previously unpublished writings of the American composer. These "memos", as Ives called them, dealt with his music, composition, criticism, autobiography, biography and other topics. During his lifetime Ives rearranged them, lent them out, mislaid and tucked them away in books so that, in the late 1940s, only about three-fifths of them were available to his biographer. After his death in 1954, Ives's papers were gradually put in order and here have been arranged into three sections, edited and annotated by John Kirkpatrick. Part One, "Pretext", sets forth Ives's aims, his views on music, critics and criticism. In part Two, "Scrapbook", Ives discusses his music. Part Three, "Memories", is devoted to biographical and autobiographical remembrances. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Charles Ives' MEMOS
I am finding the book a poignant look at the life and times of one of America's most original creative forces.These notes from Ives' sketchbook illuminate his mind and thought process towards his composition, as well as his personal outlook towards life.This book shows just how intelligent the man was, especially in his comments about other music and critics of his time.To any true music lover, MEMOS can't help but be an eye opener to how Charles Ives worked, thought and assimilated musical ideas during his creative periods.Original, thought provoking book.D. R. Safley, Fresno, CA

A classic American text.
Like Miles Davis, Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus'respecive autobiographies, Ives' "Memos" is a fascinating look at the inner workings of one of America's greatest gifts to international music. Like Mingus espescially, Ives was a very opinionated and . . . well, masculine presence. In fact, my favorite quote, which could have easily been Mingus as well is "Stand up and face the full force of a dissonance like a man." Yikes! This collection of essays - he decided against calling the project an autobiography because, in his mind, anyone who found himself important enough to deserve one probably didn't - deals with family, friends, but focusses primarily on music aesthetics. There are several stories of awful performances, justifications for experimentalism, and run-ins with his hilarious nemesis "Rollo". Highly recommended reading for anyone interested in experimental music, masculinity, Americana, as well as Ives' history. Hey, it's all straight from the horses mouth. A primary source like this is invaluable! We're lucky this stuff wasn't lost for good. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an OCR edition without illustrations or index. It may have numerous typos or missing text. However, purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original rare book from GeneralBooksClub.com. You can also preview excerpts from the book there. Purchasers are also entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Original Published by: Judd & White in 1874 in 153 pages; Subjects: Soul; History / General; Religion / Christian Theology / Anthropology; Religion / Eschatology; Religion / Theology; ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Product Description
The book has no illustrations or index. It may have numerous typos or missing text. However, purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original rare book from the publisher's website (GeneralBooksClub.com). You can also preview excerpts of the book there. Purchasers are also entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Original Publisher: New Haven, Hitchcock ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishings Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the worlds literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Product Description
Subjects: Muscatine, CharlesUniversity of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, Berkeley. Dept. of EnglishUniversity of California (System). Academic Senate. Select Committee on EducationUniversity of California, Berkeley. Strawberry Creek CollegeLoyalty oaths -- California BerkeleyFree Speech Movement (Berkeley, Calif.)Notes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be numerous typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes.When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Product Description
General Books publication date: 2009Original publication date: 1911Original Publisher: University of Wisconsin--MadisonNotes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or an index.When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there. ... Read more

Product Description
The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Fiction / General; Literary Criticism / American / General; Music / Instruction ... Read more

Product Description
This is an OCR edition without illustrations or index. It may have numerous typos or missing text. However, purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original rare book from GeneralBooksClub.com. You can also preview excerpts from the book there. Purchasers are also entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Original Published by: The author in 1880 in 438 pages; Subjects: Marine animals; Bahamas; Blacks; Voyages and travels; Marine fauna; Juvenile Nonfiction / Animals / Marine Life; Juvenile Fiction / Animals / Marine Life; Nature / Marine Life; Science / Life Sciences / Zoology / General; Social Science / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies; Travel / Caribbean & West Indies; Travel / Essays & Travelogues; ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (1)

A Tale of Two Readers
No, gentle reader; this is not Dickens. But it might be about giving someone the dickens for taking liberties with a subject interesting to some curious people. Nor is it about "...the best of times and the worst of times." But it might be said about this book that it once had its "best of times," and that its "Use By" date is now well behind us, making six-day-old cod a rather more appealing olfactory proposition.

Consider two readers, separated by three decades.

Reader No. 1, an Ivesian flush with the excitement of the 1974 Charles Ives centennial, looking for "fresh" biographical material on Ives beyond the 1955 book by Henry and Sidney Cowell, acquires this book when released. He struggles with the unusual prose style, a nearly indecipherable mix of "original Wooldridge" narrative, quotations from Ives's "Memos" and other documents,and parenthetical "asides" by Wooldridge that tantalize but do not satisfy. (And, when I say "parenthetical," I DO mean it; Wooldridge has no shortage of parentheses on his typewriter. Syntactically, the style makes Tom Wolfe, by comparison, more easily parsable on even his worst bad-hair day.) Nonetheless, he perseveres and comes away with an Ives "psychobiography" that to him seems "about right"; nothing of importance appears to have been overlooked, and if Wooldridge's insights into Ives come across as idiosyncratic, well, Ives WAS idiosyncratic.

In the process, Reader No. 1 doesn't pay heed to a Wooldridge account, on pp. 150-151, about Gustav Mahler performing Ives's 3rd Symphony in Munich in the summer of 1910, nor does he rise to a tantalizing follow-up to this event, described on p. 206. He is, after all, interested in Ives, not Mahler.

Reader No. 2, a Mahlerite as well as an Ivesian, interested in reading about Ives but with a different set of priorities, finally - nearly three decades after its publication - acquires this book. He knows it by reputation only, one based on references to it made by writers on Ives and Mahler. (These references are too numerous to elucidate, and, in any event, it is perhaps best that these writers NOT be named. A small minority of them openly question the Wooldridge account; in fairness to those who did not, it's best not to mention even the doubters.)

He is well aware that Ives knew Mahler by virtue of attending Mahler-led performances by the New York Philharmonic-Society Orchestra. (Ives mentions Mahler not only in his 1931 "Memos" but in his much earlier "Essays Before a Sonata" as well.) Perhaps on factual grounds, or possibly as an "article of faith," he accepts that Mahler visited Ives's copyist, leaving the establishment with an inked copy of the full score to the Ives 3rd Symphony. He is not entirely satisfied with Ives's dating of this inked score (and its leaving his copyist in Mahler's hands) as being in 1911; it would have had to have been in the early months of 1911 for this transaction to be possible. As for Mahler performing it in 1911, he knows this is impossible; Mahler's failing health - beginning in late February and ending with his death in May - ensured that it didn't happen in 1911. But did it perhaps happen in 1910, per Wooldridge?

Having his newly-acquired copy of Wooldridge, he turns to pp. 150-151 and reads about the "Munich account." It is - let him not mince words - fantastical. Alarms go off, sending him back to the beginning of the book, to gain a better sense of context.

His struggle with Wooldridge's stylistic idiosyncrasies matches that of Reader No. 1. With the benefit of three additional decades of Ives scholarship, he recognizes that Wooldridge's "psychobiography" is premature, incomplete, and full of solecisms too numerous to detail; the book is "damaged goods." Most remarkable of all is that there IS no context surrounding the "Munich account"; it is a total stylistic anomaly, seemingly dropped in gratuitously. And, while it answers no questions to anyone's satisfaction, it raises many. A short list would include:

* Did Walter Damrosch do a "reading" of Ives's 3rd Symphony, against indications to the contrary?

* If this reading led to Mahler's telephoning Harmony Ives, did she record it in "Our Book" (the diary that the Iveses kept)?

* Who was the American conductor who, in 1954, conducted the Ives 3rd in the Munich Deutsches Museum that Wooldridge attended?

* Has anyone done a handwriting analysis of a note, allegedly left by Mahler at the Deutsches Museum in 1910, referencing the copying of parts that might have been for the Ives 3rd?

* Does the note in fact even exist?

Yes, gentle reader, you have me correctly figured as Reader No. 2. And that I have some research yet to do.

In fairness to Wooldridge, he provides a helpful overview of Ives's songs and their background. For this, I give him one additional star above the bare minimum.

As for the rest, well, you were amply warned, weren't you?

Those wishing to know about the life of Ives are recommended to read Jan Swafford's "Charles Ives: A Life with Music" (long and detailed, but sympathetic) or Stuart Feder's "The Life of Charles Ives" (significantly shorter, but no less rich despite this, and with the clearest exposition of Ives's medical history and its effect on his short productive life). The aesthetics of his compositional process are well set out in his own "Essays Before a Sonata" and in J. Peter Burkholder's "Charles Ives and His World." Recollections by people who knew him are splendidly captured in Vivian Perlis's "Charles Ives Remembered."

And, finally, if you have your heart set on reading about Mahler's Munich performance of the work, you owe it to yourself to read Carter Scholz's title story in his "The Amount to Carry." It is hardly more fantastical than Wooldridge's account, and much better written besides.

Bob Zeidler ... Read more