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Charles Ives.

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Charles Ives. 129 Songs. Edited by H. Wiley Hitchcock. (Music of the United States of America, 12.) (Recent Researches in American Music, 47.) Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, Inc., 2004. [Frontispiece (C. Ives, ca. 1947); foreword (Richard Crawford), p. xi; pref., p. xiii-xv; essay "Ives as Songwriter and Lyricist," p. xvii-lxxi; 9 plates; score, 389 p.; apparatus (sources, editorial method, reports), p. 391-477; literature cited, p. 479-84; appendix (texts of the 129 songs), p. 485-527. ISBN 0-89579-524-8. $250.]

Throughout his compositional life, Charles Ives (1874-1954) wrote songs. Indeed, according to James B. Sinclair's A Descriptive Catalogue of the Music of Charles Ives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), they were among Ives's very first and very last newly-composed works--"Slow March" was probably written in 1887, "Sunrise" in August 1926--and there are in total 183 extant songs. As such, these works constitute arguably the single most important musical portal into the Ivesian world by affording us both a comprehensive catalog of his compositional practices and numerous insights into Ives's ideas, interests, and beliefs. Ives himself, in the so-called postface to 114 Songs (Redding, CT: self-published [printed by G. Schirmer], 1922; reprinted in 1935 [Bryn Mawr, PA: Merion Music] and 1975 [various publishers]), modestly declared that in bringing together in a single volume such a generous selection of musical material, he had "merely cleaned house." But in later years, scholars have taken a more serious view of Ives's song-writing in general, and of the 114 Songs in particular: Stuart Feder, in his Charles Ives, "My Father's Song": A Psychoanalytic Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), went so far as to claim that "Ives intended the 114 Songs as a work of autobiography" (p. 311) and that "the 114 Songs is the record of the life and times, the inner and outer experiences, of one...

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