Music and the Politics of Memory: Charles Ives's A Symphony: New England Holidays

Abstract

Scholarship on Charles Ives has too often been reluctant to sort out what is problematical in his musical image of America. This article attempts to do so as part of an examination of Ives's A Symphony: New England Holidays, a cycle of tone poems depicting the major patriotic holidays celebrated during Ives's boyhood. The work is both a memorial to national unity, which Ives felt had collapsed in the twentieth century, and a protest against the political culture responsible. The musical means to these ends raise the question of the relationship between politics and musical form, and, with form, of musical analysis, in a particularly transparent way. Like many European composers of the era, Ives wanted to create a national style. But he did not want a style that could be reduced to formulas and circulated as a commodity. The old America he celebrated, as opposed to the new one he resisted, could be identified (or fantasized) as a culture that above all could not be commodified. The Holidays Symphony seeks to create what one might call a critical nostalgia. Its music demands to be understood as a “picture” of authentic American experience by refusing to be understandable as music on the only terms available in its day.