Charles Ives: "My Fathers Song": A Psychoanalytic Biography

About this book

"A sound of a distant horn Oer shadowed lake is borne my fathers song."Charles Ives Charles Ives perhaps the quintessential American composer of the twentieth century drew on his childhood experiences in a small New England town in his music. Through his close relationship with his father George a Civil War bandmaster Ives developed a powerful feeling for nineteenth-century rural America. This bookthe first full-scale psychoanalytic biography of a major composerexamines the lives of the two men and shows how a knowledge of their relationship as father and son teacher and pupil is central to an understanding of Ivess work. Stuart Feder a psychoanalyst with training in musicology demonstrates that George exerted so pervasive an influence on Charless creative life that Ivess music may be seen as the result of an unconscious fantasy of posthumous collaboration between father and son. The music bears Georges mark not only in its incorporation of hymn tunes parlor ballads Civil War marches and other homely sources that derived from his youth but also in its use of technical musical devices attributed to George. Moreover the span of Ivess creative life reveals another connection to his father: Charless musical productivity began to wane in his forties as he approached the age at which his father died. Dr. Feder examines the influence of Georges teaching and storytelling on Charless years as a composer. Ivess later decline is traced psychologically and medically. Using Ivess music as an essential part of his data Dr. Feder demonstrates how music can illuminate and be expressive of the inner life of its creator.