Music is an outer representation of a divine spirit inside each of us

While I don't use the word 'divine' in any religious sense, I do love the sentiment of the title, which comes from a wonderful article about Charles Ives on Slate by Jan Swafford (whose biography of Johannes Brahms I loved). The article has audio examples, of Ives' music which are wonderful, but I like how Swafford explains how Ives came to be Ives.; showing how "part of the process of discovering who you are is finding why you are: What you want to say, why you're an artist in the first place." And how Ives' "training had taught him to shape big pieces" it did not give him "a reason to write them" until he went and found his own direction. While I already know some of Charles Ives' music such as The Unanswered Question (Bernstein's riveting account in his Norton Lectures at Harvard in the early 70s being a favorite reading) as well as the Concord Sonata, this article gave me more interest in finding out what Ives had to say and how he said it.

POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 5:25 PM