The code behind the music
Bernard Herrmann once mentioned that people would be wasting their time if they looked for the methodology behind Ives’s music.3 As great a musician and supporter of Ives as Herrmann was, hardly could he have been more wrong, although, forty years after he made his remarks, the limited available analytical documentation has left the mechanics and fabric of Ives’s works still largely a mystery, a segment of American musicology somehow, finding more need to recreate his being taking precedence over what he did. Allowing, perhaps preferring, that the “outside world” continue to confuse Ives’s compositional processes for a type of rhapsodic improvisatory facility, many musicians still remain as far removed from being able to appreciate what he did as ever. Although the very complexity and free spirit of Ives’s music certainly ventures within the rhapsodic, nevertheless there are tangible reasons why the music sounds the way it does; as such, the analyses in this volume often entailed breaking ground previously undisturbed. However, not explainable other than by technical analysis, the “code” that exists within Ives’s music does reveal that he understood how to manipulate the structural fabric of musical sound to elicit a level of emotive responses that is almost unique in the music of any century.
In 1987, when Carol K. Baron wrote her Ph.D. dissertation, “Ives On His Own Terms: An Explication, a Theory of Pitch Organization, and a New Critical Edition for the Three Page Sonata,” she uncovered, apparently for the first time, the systematic methodology that underlies much of Ives’s music.4 Almost a decade later, in 1996, Philip Lambert published his landmark volume, The Music of Charles Ives.5 Finally, in book form, something tangible about Ives’s music, other than just its relationship to existing melodies was in print. According to Wolfgang Rathert in 1997, even Stravinsky failed to understand the unique attributes of systemized organization that Ives incorporated into his most wildly free-spirited compositions.6 Today, thanks to Baron’s lead, and Lambert following the trail, some information now is available showing that numerous technical aspects of Ives’s compositional language indeed can be isolated—even though the rhapsodic element of Ives’s music often defies precise analysis and likely always will. As the larger shroud slowly was lifted from Ives’s creative processes, finally what many previously had considered was beyond ordinary analysis, even unconnected to any standard mechanism of musical invention, began to be revealed.

The dates of Ives’s compositions
Those who are old enough to remember Ives’s grand and precipitous ascent in the 1960s and 70’s also recall the sense of wonder and discovery of all things Ives at the time. However, ever since 1987, when Maynard Solomon questioned the integrity of a long absent Ives,10 the Ives musicological establishment—while protesting Solomon’s claims that Ives deliberately falsified his manuscripts—nevertheless, has obliquely validated his position by venturing the wholesale redating of Ives’s entire output, based predominantly on the uncorroborated dating of historic manuscript paper stock,11 and promoted a revised interpretation of his life. Brushing aside even the legendary catalog by John Kirkpatrick (A Temporary Catalog of The Music Manuscripts of Charles Edward Ives),12 the new revised assessment of Ives’s works has moved them ever forward in time. The remarkable priority and range of them, however, remains critically tied to Ives’s significance as a prophetic twentieth century figure.
It is said that the new Ives was not a product of his early environment, nor his religious, philosophical and cultural roots.13 Nor did he benefit much from the teaching and guidance of his father, George Ives, after all.14 Ives, having been exposed only to vernacular marches and hymns, would need the expertise of Horatio Parker to introduce him to the methods of the European masters, finally giving him the “proper” musical education he sorely lacked.15 His background thus denied, the “new” Ives also is a tragic and opportunistic person, troubled, even mentally unstable, and hardly more of a pioneer than multitudes of other composers of his time.16 Had he been less exceptional might some be less driven to explain him in such unexceptional terms?
However, the means to refute the most fundamental charges that emerged from Solomon’s supposition was offered in 1990 by Carol K. Baron.17 Solidly endorsed by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, Baron offered a scientific means of determining the dates of Ives’s manuscripts through Ives’s changing handwriting over his productive years. It is the one consistent marker that does not appear to have been reflected in the new vision of Ives, despite initial claims to the contrary.18 Likely, this happenstance is because the essence Baron’s system was characterized glibly as being “subjective and unprovable.”19 Although her research could have been verified independently, up to the time of this writing, it has withered in the vine; its position diametrically opposite to the stance of “official” Ives musicology, it is clearly unwelcome.
The dates of Ives’s music, however, ought not to be controversial, as the writer will demonstrate. The characteristically evolving traits in Ives’s manuscripts are the keys to re-establishing the record. Ives’s music and life, still caught up in the wake of, has been long overdue for a new objective examination. Though the revised dates of Ives’s compositions, per se, have remained central to the discussion, it is not because a decade here or there changes the sound, or the expressive power of his music. It is because the relentless push to reinvent Ives’s life and redate his work has devalued it and his legacy at almost every level. Indeed, the essential accuracy of John Kirkpatrick’s legendary catalog—along with Ives’s priority—can be ascertained with little less certainty than that of almost any major composer. As such, this volume provides the long-awaited validation of Baron’s system, in addition to numerous provisional positions based on her research throughout this writing; the writer, waiting in vain for its substantive evaluation, found it necessary to undertake the