New England Transcendentalism versus Virulent Nationalism: The Evolution of Charles Ives' Patriotic march Music

1999 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-33
Author(s):  
David C. Mauk
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Charles Ives ◽  
New England Transcendentalism

Charles Ives and the Reformed Tradition

2007 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-321
Author(s):  
James N. Lapsley
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Charles Ives ◽  
Reformed Tradition ◽  
The Third ◽  
American Composer ◽  
New England Transcendentalism

The American composer Charles Ives (1874–1954) was rooted in New England Congregationalism, the Puritan wing of the Reformed tradition. Although he is often seen as an innovative composer identified with New England transcendentalism, he never abandoned his Reformed evangelical faith but rather expressed it in some of his greatest music, particularly the Third and Fourth Symphonies.

Music and the Politics of Memory: Charles Ives's A Symphony: New England Holidays

2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 459-475
Author(s):  
LAWRENCE KRAMER
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Charles Ives ◽  
Politics Of Memory ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Tone Poems ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Do So

AbstractScholarship on Charles Ives has too often been reluctant to sort out what is problematical in his musical image of America. This article attempts to do so as part of an examination of Ives's A Symphony: New England Holidays, a cycle of tone poems depicting the major patriotic holidays celebrated during Ives's boyhood. The work is both a memorial to national unity, which Ives felt had collapsed in the twentieth century, and a protest against the political culture responsible. The musical means to these ends raise the question of the relationship between politics and musical form, and, with form, of musical analysis, in a particularly transparent way. Like many European composers of the era, Ives wanted to create a national style. But he did not want a style that could be reduced to formulas and circulated as a commodity. The old America he celebrated, as opposed to the new one he resisted, could be identified (or fantasized) as a culture that above all could not be commodified. The Holidays Symphony seeks to create what one might call a critical nostalgia. Its music demands to be understood as a “picture” of authentic American experience by refusing to be understandable as music on the only terms available in its day.

scholarly journals Charles Ives’s Decoration Day: A Conductor’s Guide

SAGE Open ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 215824401882035
Author(s):  
Brian Coffill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
New England ◽  
Conductor's Guide ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Childhood Memories ◽  
Charles Ives ◽  
Practical Analysis ◽  
And Performance

Charles Ives’ Decoration Day, a dreamy haze of almost-forgotten memories and half-remembered tunes, depicts recollections American Civil War through the eyes of a Connecticut youth at the end of the nineteenth century. The work, originally published as the second movement of Ives’ New England Holidays Symphony for orchestra, is a musical representation of the composer’s childhood memories of that eponymous holiday. This paper links Ives’ own descriptions of the composition, his childhood, and his memories of the somber annual memorial to the musical gestures in the score, synthesizing extant scholarship with practical analysis and performance experience. Through better understanding Charles’ connections to the Civil War, specifically by way of his father, the bandmaster George Ives, Decoration Day comes to life as a stirring epitaph for a boy’s long-lost hero.

GIBRAN'S THE PROCESSION IN THE TRANSCENDENTALIST CONTEXT

Arabica ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 477-493
Author(s):  
Ahmad Majdoubeh
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
The Other ◽  
Precise Nature ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
New England Transcendentalism ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Do So

AbstractThe aim of this article is to examine Gibran Kahlil Gibran's ideas, as articulated in The Procession (Al-Mawākib), in the context of New England Transcendentalism, in particular Emerson's and Thoreau's. Even though critics recognize Ralph Waldo Emerson (and less frequently Henry David Thoreau) as an influence on Gibran, the precise nature of the influence has not been spelled out clearly. In this study, I shall attempt to do so. To the end of establishing the New England Transcendentalist influence on Gibran more firmly and coherently, I locate, explain, and highlight some of the striking echoes, similarities, and analogies (linguistic, philosophic, as well as structural) in Gibran's The Procession, on the one hand, and Emerson's essays and Thoreau's Walden, on the other hand. Such an examination of the relationship will certainly enrich the meanings of Gibran's poem, shed a new light on his ideas, and suggest an angle from which his philosophy is best viewed.

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