1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Essays and Lectures (New York: The Library of America, 1983), p. 70.

2. A lively debate on the nature of Ives’s illness may be found in Gayle
Sherwood’s “Charles Ives and ‘Our National Malady’” in Journal of the
American Musicological Society 54/3 (Fall 2001), 555-584. This issue of
the journal also includes a response by Stuart Feder, “Heard Maladies Are
Sweet (‘But Those Unheard Are Sweeter’): A Response to Gayle
Sherwood,” 627-641, and Sherwood’s reply to Feder, “Ives and
Neurasthenia: A Response to Stuart Feder,” 641-643.

3. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “History,” in Essays and Lectures (New York: The
Library of America, 1983), p. 237.

4. Ibid., p. 237.

5. Relevant writings on these topics may be found in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die italienische Reise, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche 11, ed. Ernst Beutler (Zürich: Artemis-Verlag, 1949).

6. The others are “Plato; or, the Philosopher,” “Swedenborg; or, the Mystic,” “Montaigne; or, the Skeptic,” “Shakespeare; or, the Poet,” and “Napoleon; or, the Man of the World.”

7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Goethe; or, the Writer,” in Essays and Lectures (New York: The Library of America, 1983), p. 747.

8. Ibid., p. 746.

9. Ibid., p. 753.

10. The point is made in Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1956). The title chapter is especially relevant.

11. Emerson, “History,” p. 237.

12. Ibid., p. 249.

13. Ibid., p. 255.

14. Charles Ives, Essays Before a Sonata, The Majority and Other Writings, ed. Howard Boatwright (New York: W.W. Norton, 1970), p. 88.

15. Geoffrey Block, “Ives and the ‘Sounds that Beethoven Didn’t Have’”, in Charles Ives and the Classical Tradition, ed. Geoffrey Block and J. Peter Burkholder (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 37.

16. J. Peter Burkholder, “Ives and the Nineteenth-Century European Tradition,” in Charles Ives and the Classical Tradition, ed. Geoffrey Block and J. Peter Burkholder (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 28.

17. The process in fact can be used to describe the Fifth Symphony. In each of the symphony’s four movements, Beethoven obsesses over and continually recasts the opening motive.

18. The designation is derived from Ives’s essay on “The Alcotts”: “All around you, under the Concord sky, there still floats the influence of that human faith melody, transcendent and sentimental enough for the enthusiast or the cynic respectively, reflecting an innate hope—a common interest in common things and common men—a tune the Concord bards are ever playing, while they pound away at the immensities with a Beethovenlike sublimity, and with, may we say, a vehemence and perseverance—for that part of greatness is not so difficult to emulate” (pp. 47-48).

19. Charles Ives, Memos, ed. John Kirkpatrick (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972), pp. 43-44.

20. Block, “Ives and the ‘Sounds that Beethoven Didn’t Have,” p. 50.

21. Burkholder, “Ives and the Nineteenth-Century European Tradition,” pp. 11-13.

22. Parker had studied not only with Rheinberger but also with the American composer George Chadwick. He was also instrumental in encouraging Ives’s interest in New England Transcendentalism.

23. Ives’s father was a band director, and Charles worked as a church organist beginning in his late teens.

24. Especially illuminating on this topic is Robert P. Morgan, “Spatial Form in Ives,” in An Ives Celebration: Papers and Panels of the Charles Ives Centennial Festival-Conference, ed. H. Wiley Hitchcock and Vivian Perlis (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1977), pp. 145-158.

25. The terminology comes from H. Wiley Hitchcock in Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction, fourth edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000), in chapter 3, “Cultivated and Vernacular Traditions, and the Impact of Romanticism,” pp. 55-65

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