Ives

Jens's review yesterday got me onto an Ives kick, because I had heard and seen some tributes to him this week (Wednesday, May 19, was the 50th anniversary of his death). NPR ran this tribute to Ives by his biographer, Jan Swafford, so I have put together a little compendium of Ives links. Swafford's summation of Ives's role in American cultural history is apt, the "Walt Whitman of sound": his music is at once familiar and exceedingly strange, lyric, and at times bordering on the insane.

· Justin Davis, The Philharmonic celebrates Charles Ives complicated and confounding music, May 9, in New York Newsday, about the series of Ives tribute concerts given by the New York Philharmonic (through May 29)

· Anthony Tommasini, Finding Iconoclastic Playmates for Ives, That Musical Loner, May 13, in the New York Times (review of one above concerts)

· Chicago Sun-Times music critic Wynne Delacoma chastizes the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for not programming any of Ives's music this year or the next (Aimard celebrates all-American Ives, May 18)

· Jan Swafford, How Ives Jibes: Understanding America's contentious composer, May 17, in Slate

· Anastasia Tsioulcas, Ives Thrives on 50th-Anniversary Release, May 14, from Reuters, about the Ives recording by singer Susan Graham and pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, including pieces they have been playing around the country (reviewed by Wynne Delacoma in Chicago above, and by Anthony Tommasini on May 20)

· David Schiff, The Many Faces of Ives, January 1997, in the Atlantic Monthly

· Jan Swafford, Ives the Man: His Life

· Jan Swafford, A Question Is Better Than an Answer

Jan Swafford, First Chapter of Charles Ives: A Life with Music

· The Charles Ives Society

· Danbury (Conn.) Museum and Historical Society (in Ives's childhood house)

· The 32¢ postage stamp issued in Ives's honor in 1997

· Charles Ives Web Site

· Thomas Hampson, I Hear America Singing: Charles Ives

· Charles Ives, Essays before a Sonata (Project Gutenberg)

· The Charles Ives Papers (Irving S. Gilmore Music Library at Yale)

· Listen to a recording of String Quartet No. 1 ("From the Salvation Army") by the Concord String Quartet

I hope that will be enough to keep you people busy.