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Charles Ives at 150: Music, Imagination, and American Culture
A festival coming to the Jacobs School of Music and Indiana University Bloomington from September 30 to October 8, 2024.
The leading American concert composer of his time, Charles Ives (1874-1954) is also an iconic American genius whose story links to Transcendentalism, the Civil War, camp meetings, and Wall Street.
The festival will furnish a unique opportunity to freshly explore Ives’s significance in framing the ever-elusive American experience. Too often, he has been viewed as an outsider, an oddball, an accident, an avant-gardist ahead of his time. The central premise of the festival is that Ives vividly exemplifies his own American time and place: the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.
All festival events are free of charge.
Curated by preeminent Ives scholar J. Peter Burkholder and cultural historian Joseph Horowitz, and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, this cross-disciplinary festival will be by far the most ambitious celebration of the Ives Sesquicentennial.
Festival performances will showcase the breadth of Ives’s output, including:
- The Second and Third Symphonies
- The symphonic poems Three Places in New England, TheUnanswered Question, and Central Park in the Dark
- Both of Ives’s piano sonatas, both string quartets, and all four violin sonatas
- Major works for band and chamber orchestra
- Choral music from The Celestial Country to Psalm 90
- And innumerable songs
The participating musicians include three pianists long associated with Ives—Jeremy Denk, Gilbert Kalish, and Steven Mayer—along with the Pacifica Quartet, violinist Stefan Jackiw, and baritone William Sharp, a peerless interpreter of Ives’s songs.
These musicians join Jacobs faculty, students, and ensembles—including three bands, two orchestras, the New Music Ensemble, and the contemporary choir NOTUS.
All the concerts will be framed as public humanities events, incorporating commentary and discussion. The central symphonic program, conducted by Arthur Fagen, will premiere a visual accompaniment for Ives’s Three Places in New England. An extensive program companion will be distributed free of charge.
Participating scholars will target their remarks to a general audience and will stress the larger play of American culture.
- Tim Barringer, a leading historian of nineteenth-century visual art, will juxtapose Ives with painters of the American landscape.
- Allen Guelzo, a leading Lincoln scholar, will explore the influence on Ives of the Civil War.
- Historian Alan Lessoff will describe pertinent re-framing of the “Gilded Age”.
- Musicologist Denise Von Glahn, music theorists David Thurmaier, Chelsey Hamm, and Derek J. Myler, biographer Jan Swafford, and editor James B. Sinclair will explore Ives in relationship to American life and American music.
For a complete schedule, hotel reservations, and further information, see https://blogs.iu.edu/jsommusicology/ives-festival/.
Charles Ives at 150 is brought to you in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the IU Public Arts & Humanities Project, and the Jacobs School of Music; with support from the Charles Ives Society, the Five Friends Master Class Series, and the IU Departments of Musicology, Piano, Strings, and Comparative Literature. Media sponsorship by WFIU Public Radio.
