Charles Ives (1874-1954)
Songs • 2

When, in 1922, Charles Ives published a volume entitled 114 Songs, he was likely drawing attention to the fact that the genre had played a central part in his output. 85 years on and, for all that his wider reputation may now rest on his orchestral, chamber and piano music, it is the songs that represent the heart of his creative thinking. Nor was that initial volume at all comprehensive; Ives having written almost 200 songs, of which this present edition includes all of those he completed. The expressive variety encountered is accordingly vast: indeed, the gradual evolution of Ives’s songwriting, from those that draw overtly on the Austro-German Lieder and English parlour-song traditions to ones that evince an anarchic humour as keenly as others do a profound vision, is surely analogous to the wider evolution of American music over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centurie