All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing - Hardcover

Burkholder, Professor J. Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300056427 ISBN 13: 9780300056426

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1995

Synopsis

Charles Ives is famous for using borrowed material in his music. Almost two hundred individual works or movements, spanning his entire career and representing more than a third of his output, incorporate music by other composers or from his own previous work. In this book, the eminent Ives scholar J. Peter Burkholder identifies the different kinds of "quotations" in Ives's music, explores the complex musical, aesthetic, and psychological motivations behind the borrowings, and shows the purpose, techniques, and effects that characterize each one.
Burkholder catalogues fourteen distinct ways that Ives borrowed, ranging from direct quotation to paraphrase, variation, collage, modeling, and stylistic allusion. Arguing that these borrowing procedures were compositional strategies, he provides a new perspective on Ives's process of composition. In addition, by tracing the development of Ives's borrowing practices through his career, Burkholder contributes to an understanding of the composer's stylistic evolution. And by showing how much of Ives's music uses borrowing procedures that are common to many composers, he reveals that Ives is not as far removed from the classic-romantic tradition as has been thought. Finally, Burkholder's comprehensive treatment of Ives's borrowing techniques offers a new perspective on the entire field of musical borrowing.

About this title

About the Author

J. Peter Burkholder is associate professor of music at Indiana University

Reviews

Charles Ives (1874^-1954) is famous for composing music that incorporates both American and European themes. Burkholder analyzes Ives' principal compositions, carefully describing how Ives used and transformed his borrowings. Of 14 procedures that Burkholder identifies, Ives most often used the modeling of a section on the structure of an existing piece; cumulative setting, a complex form in which a countermelody and paraphrases of the main theme occur before the entire theme is stated at the end of the section; collage, in which a swirl of quoted and paraphrased tunes is added to a musical structure based on other procedures; and patchwork, in which fragments of several tunes are stitched together. In the accompanying musical examples, Burkholder lines up existing tunes with an Ives excerpt, clearly showing how Ives proceeded. Written very clearly, the book is aimed at those interested in knowing as much as possible about the origins of Ives' melodies and how he constructed his music. It is probably best appreciated when used in tandem with recordings of Ives' music to facilitate following the printed musical examples. Alan Hirsch

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300056427
• ISBN 13: 9780300056426
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 568