Wonderful to see Ives discussed on the list occasionally.  As it happens I
have the disc reviewed and share Steve's high opinion of it.  I don't find
this music inaccessible in the least: it simply requires concentration and
repeated listenings tofully reward.

Recently I have been reading the collection of Harold Schonberg's Sunday
columns for the NY Times (Facing the Music).  It's fascinating to see what
a critic was talking about thirty or forty years ago.  One of the things
Schonberg was talking about was Charles Ives' music, which was not as
widely appreciated in the decade or so after his death as it is now.

A column about Ives from 1961 includes some interesting quotes from the
composer that I thought I would pass along.  Steve talked aboput Ruggles as
having a constructed image.  Ives, though a New York insurance executive,
was an American origina; Shchonberg calls him a "Yankee skeptic." He
detested artifice and formality.  He said that Debussey would have been a
better composer, "if he had hoed corn or sold newspapers for a living, for
in this way he might have gained a deeper vitality and a truer theme to
sing at night and of a Sunday."

The article concludes with the following paragraphs:

   Had Ives been a smoother composer, a more graceful one, a more
   melodious one, well and good--but he would not have been Charles
   Ives.  He himself had something to say along that line.  "some
   fiddler," he wrote, "was once honest enough or brave enough, or
   perhaps ignorant enough, to say that Beethoven didn't know how to
   write for the violin.  That, maybe, is one of the many reasons
   Beethoven is not a Vieuxtemps.  Another man said that Beethoven's
   piano sonatas are not pianistic.  With a little effort, perhaps,
   Beethoven could have become a Thalberg."

   Ives did not draw the moral, but the inference is clear.  Had he
   smoothed out his rugged, uncompromising, individual approach, had
   he become a 'practical' orchestrator, had he worn a sonata suit, a
   contrapuntal necktie and a diatonic shirt, he might have become a
   Paine.  Or even a MacDowell.

Another column reports on Ive's copy of the score for the Concord Sonata.
Ive's scrawled notes in the margins of the score to the Concord Sonata are
amusing and revealing. He uses the diminutive Rollo to signify: nice and
polite listenners with academic minds. A sampling:

   "Don't try to please the ladies Rollo!  Line her out!  And not the
   same nice way every time Rollo!"

   "Or in the early morning--start pianissimo--if you feel that way."

Regarding the wooden strip with which the pianist plays note clusters:

   "This is not playing with a club--as Mr. Rollo says--when you hit
   a nice key on a piano keyboard you [are hitting] a long board or a
   stick which hits the hammer, which makes a nice tone."

   "Those C sharps and D flats are not the same nice notes.  They have
   different meanings--like it or not!"

   "Never mind the lilly ladybird ears!  Be a man!  Don't be afraid to
   harm the thumb...Hard at it...Help the soft ears walk out!

Ed