![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.loc.gov\/service\/pnp\/cph\/3b10000\/3b10000\/3b10800\/3b10888_150px.jpg\")
Frank Gerratana, Charles Edward Ives, 1947, http:\/\/loc.gov\/pictures\/resource\/cph.3b10888\/<\/p><\/div>\n
Charles Ives<\/a>, the early twentieth century,American composer pictured pensively above, is situated at an interesting boundary between historical debates of what constitutes \u201cAmerican music\u201d that we\u2019ve discussed in class. While Virgil Tomson\u2019s ideas considered American music \u201cderived from the British Isles\u201d to be authentic\u2014using North America’s Anglophone predominance as explanation for a continued lineage of English culture and music over all else\u2014other critics and musicologists have proposed that American music’s essence derives from diverse folk traditions.[1]<\/a> Charles Ives was descended from pilgrims and grew up with Anglo-American melodies in New England\u2014however, his shift to avant-garde styles, combined with influence from folk traditions considered part of an \u201cAmerican school\u201d of composition, demonstrates the futility of trying to narrowly define \u201cAmerican music.\u201d[2]<\/a> Ives’ development problematizes the work of early twentieth century music critics like Tomson and Olin Downes, who\u2014possessing prominent influence over public perception of American classical music\u2014used Ives to promote contradictory, limited arguments over American musical authenticity.<\/p>\n The debate over American Music\u2019s standards and authenticity, especially when considering the influences of white male composers, was a means of determining what whiteness was in an early twentieth-century cultural context. Tomson saw an evolving American idiom\u2014though in some ways diverging from European music\u2014nevertheless marked by similarities indicating \u201cthe products of a common tradition.\u201d[3]<\/a> Tomson believed Charles Ives\u2019 music fit the characteristics closely linking European\/Anglophone lineage to American music. However, in a 1937 New York Times article by music critic Olin Downes, a contemporary of Ives, the critic glances at \u201cnative scores\u201d and lauds the many folk music traditions informing the development of modern American composers.[4]<\/a> Downes believed that not all American symphonic repertoire had been \u201cmere imitators of European models of composition.\u201d[5]<\/a> Instead of pointing out examples of American music deriving new forms from only a foundation of European music (as Tomson did), Downes emphasized the wealth of folk music that American composers could draw from, \u201ceither grown from the soil or transplanted there from outside sources.\u201d[6]<\/a> Still, he links and celebrates the connection of this distinctly American folk music to songs like \u201cDixie\u201d which immortalized the ideals of slavery and the Old South. This fact demonstrates a racialized context which\u2014well into the twentieth century\u2014still held mainstream influence in legitimizing problematic forms of white American culture. Nonetheless, as Tomson, who drew from racist, controversial scholarly ideas like those of George Pullen Jackson, saw American history as too short to legitimize its composers, Downes declared that the young, white male composers of the era, including Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Charles Ives, were too little performed.[7]<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n In conclusion, debates over what Ives represented showed incongruent definitions of musical authenticity, since one composer\u2014Charles Ives\u2014fit into both \u201ccamps.\u201d It\u2019s perhaps more important to consider how analyzing debates over American music through Ives and the perspectives of critics like Tomson and Downes problematizes their arguments. While they musically diverge, the convergence around attempts to define the raw materials worth lauding in American music as a reflection of whiteness (and thus white American culture) provides a glimpse into the mainstream, overtly racialized ways in which music critics influenced society and worked to further an exclusive conception of American music.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Virgil Thomson, American Music Since 1910, <\/em>Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, 16.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Harold C. Schonberg,. “Natural American, Natural Rebel, Natural Avant-Gardist: Charles Ives had no use for Mozart, Haydn, Mendelssohn,Tchaikovsky and Wagner- Charles Ives Ives at the Keyboard,”\u00a0New York Times (1923-),\u00a0Apr 21, 1974. https:\/\/www.proquest.com\/historical-newspapers\/natural-american-rebel-avant-gardist\/docview\/119909304\/se-2; Olin Downes, “A Glance at Native Scores,\u201d\u00a0New York Times (1923-),\u00a0Jul 25, 1937. https:\/\/www.proquest.com\/historical-newspapers\/glance-at-native-scores\/docview\/102135938\/se-2.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Thomson, American Music Since 1910, <\/em>20.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Downes, A Glance at Native Scores,\u201d\u00a0https:\/\/www.proquest.com\/historical-newspapers\/glance-at-native-scores\/docview\/102135938\/se-2.<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n [7]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Charles Ives, the early twentieth century,American composer pictured pensively above, is situated at an interesting boundary between historical debates of what constitutes \u201cAmerican music\u201d that we\u2019ve discussed in class. While Virgil Tomson\u2019s ideas considered American music \u201cderived from the … Continue reading