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Charles Ives: "My Father`s Song": A Psychoanalytic Biography

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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!

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.