Breaking Time's Arrow: Experiment and Expression in the Music of Charles Ives (Musical Meaning and Interpretation) - Hardcover

McDonald, Matthew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0253012732 ISBN 13: 9780253012739

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2014

Synopsis

Charles Ives (1874–1954) moved traditional compositional practice in new directions by incorporating modern and innovative techniques with nostalgic borrowings of 19th century American popular music and Protestant hymns. Matthew McDonald argues that the influence of Emerson and Thoreau on Ives's compositional style freed the composer from ordinary ideas of time and chronology, allowing him to recuperate the past as he reached for the musical unknown. McDonald links this concept of the multi-temporal in Ives’s works to Transcendentalist understandings of eternity. His approach to Ives opens new avenues for inquiry into the composer's eclectic and complex style.

About this title

About the Author:

Matthew McDonald is Associate Professor of Music at Northeastern University.

Review:

Matthew McDonald offers a trenchant and intellectually expansive reading of Ives's relationship to time by connecting several compositions―and indeed, the composer’s larger conceptualization of the past, present, and future―to the Emersonian concept of the 'everlasting Now'. This book is a wonderfully written, important contribution to scholarship on the music of Charles Ives. (Gayle Sherwood Magee author of Charles Ives Reconsidered)

About this edition

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0253012732
• ISBN 13: 9780253012739
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 216