Charles Ives, perhaps the quintessential American composer of the twentieth century, drew on his childhood experiences in a small New England town in his music. Through his close relationship with his father, George, a Civil War bandmaster, Ives developed a powerful feeling for nineteenth-century rural America. This book--the first full-scale psychoanalytic biography of a major composer--examines the lives of the two men and shows how a knowledge of their relationship as father and son, teacher and pupil, is central to an understanding of Ives's work. Stuart Feder, a psychoanalyst with training in musicology, demonstrates that George exerted so pervasive an influence on Charles's creative life that Ives's music may be seen as the result of an unconscious fantasy of posthumous collaboration between father and son. The music bears George's mark, not only in its incorporation of hymn tunes, parlor ballads, Civil War marches, and other homely sources that derived from his youth, but also in its use of technical musical devices attributed to George. Moreover, the span of Ives's creative life reveals another connection to his father: Charles's musical productivity began to wane in his forties, as he approached the age at which his father died. Dr. Feder examines the influence of George's teaching and storytelling on Charles's years as a composer. Ives's later decline is traced psychologically and medically. Using Ives's music as an essential part of his data, Dr. Feder demonstrates how music can illuminate and be expressive of the inner life of its creator.
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From Kirkus Reviews
Traditional writing on Charles Ives, beginning with Henry and Sidney Cowell's slight 1955 biography, offers a sunny, straightforward view of the composer's creative legacy from his eccentric bandmaster father. More recently, Maynard Solomon (Beethoven's psycho-biographer) has suggested that the father/son relationship was, at least unconsciously, a fiercely rivalrous, darkly Oedipal one. Feder, a psychoanalyst with musical training, now presents a biography devoted to the more complex proposition that ``much of Ives's career in music was the result of an ongoing intrapsychic collaboration with his father.'' The slightly black sheep of a wealthy Danbury, Connecticut, family, George Ives served in the Civil War and aspired to a musical career, but settled for work in the family business, using his free time for community bands and musical ``experiments.'' First son Charles, born with perfect pitch, responded acutely to George's music-making, saw his father as a hero, learned at his side. The result? ``An unrestricted, creative superego.'' But when Charles's gifts soon surpassed George's, his ambivalent feelings (shame, anger, guilt) led him to idealize his father--who died prematurely--and to forsake a full-time music career. Instead, Charles became a successful insurance executive, composing in his spare time. And his music, packed with nostalgic references to childhood and an idealized father, became a form of nonstop ``mourning''--until his own premature creative death (brought on, Feder argues, by internal conflict as much as by physical illnesses). Feder's analysis is marred by thickets of jargon, Freudian excess (e.g., the ear as substitute vagina or phallus), and numbing repetition. But his research is impressive; the work-by-work interpretations contain valuable insights; and, if Feder's thesis ultimately seems overstated and incomplete (Ives's mother remains a cipher), Ives specialists and psycho-biography enthusiasts will nonetheless want to slog through this dense, sporadically rewarding study. (Sixteen illustrations--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
fascinating, worth reading,
This review is from: Charles Ives: "My Father`s Song": A Psychoanalytic Biography (Hardcover)
As the other reviewer points out, this book is sometimes skewed, but overall it's an incredible achievement, and I highly recommend it. Ives' relationship with his father, and the extent to which his father's radical ideas influenced him had been little studied until this book was written, so it was really groundbreaking research. I suggest reading several other books on Ives if you are reading this - it will put it all into context. But this is a must-have for anyone interested in Ives.
Musicians will also find this an enlightening work, as it delves into the subtext of so many of the songs (in particular). Well worth it for every performer!
4 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Attempting to explain- away Ives,
By A Customer
This review is from: Charles Ives: "My Father`s Song": A Psychoanalytic Biography (Hardcover)
This biography of Ives neglects the most important thing that makes Charles Edward Ives someone worth reading about; brushing his music aside, Feder contiues on to show us exactly why we should be indifferent at best to this all but crazy composer. While his anyalisis of the music is interesting, it is shallow at best, picking and choosing songs and other works to support his claims about Ives. He delves deeply into a man, and looses the reason Ives is someone we care about-- the music he wrote. Ives certianly had an unusual, and perhaps unhealthy, relationship with his father, but Feder exagerates this and turns it into something unlike what Ives himself said it was. Feder uses this to explain Ives' eccentricites and moodiness in his later life, ignoring the fact that Ives suffered from adult onset diabetes, which was a likely cause of that, as well as a possible cause of George Ives' premature death. At its best, this book is a penetrating look at Charles Ives the man. At its worst, it disenegrates into Freudan goobledey-gook of which it is difficult to make heads or tails.
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