In John Kirkpatrick, American Music, and the Printed Page, Drew Massey examines one of the primary advocates of Charles Ives’s music. Throughout his lifetime, John Kirkpatrick championed Ives’s compositions in work as a performer, editor, writer, and archivist. Massey takes an in-depth look at Kirkpatrick’s editing processes and priorities in dealing with the complexity of Ives’s manuscripts. Along the way, the author also discusses Kirkpatrick’s editorial work with American composers such as Carl Ruggles, Hunter Johnson, and Elliott Carter.

Gayle Sherwood Magee’s Charles Ives Reconsidered presents a comprehensive biography that offers new perspectives on the composer, incorporating significant Ives scholarship of the late 20th century. Published in 2008, Magee references Ives research from the mid-1970s onwards that proposed alternate understandings of the composer’s creative output.

Edited by Tom C. Owens, Selected Correspondence of Charles Ives includes letters to and from the composer, dating from 1881 until after his death in 1954. Ives wrote and received hundreds of letters throughout his lifetime, which are preserved in the Charles Ives Papers in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University. Owens systematically presents these primary source materials, with numerous annotations that give context and offer insights into Ives’s relationships and life experiences.

James B. Sinclair’s A Descriptive Catalogue of The Music of Charles Ives is an invaluable resource that systematically presents the complete works of the composer. The full catalogue of compositions is organized into 12 genres, and for each work, information such as the instrumentation, time duration, incipit, premiere performance, and musical borrowings are given. This resource also includes pertinent supplementary information, such as a chronology of significant events in the composer’s life and a list of sound recordings made by Ives.

Jan Swafford’s biography, Charles Ives: A Life with Music, offers a detailed account of the composer’s life, philosophical perspectives, and musical development. The author’s approach encourages the reader to understand how the numerous aspects of Ives’s life are interconnected with his music. Along these lines, Swafford explains that “this biography tries to be less like a book and more like life; while it does not lack structure, it unfolds like life and at times resembles an improvisation.”¹

In A Union of Diversities: Style in the Music of Charles Ives, Larry Starr writes a listener’s guide to Ives’s music, focusing on the composer’s distinctive use of numerous styles. The book presents accessible discussions that focus mainly on the songs for voice and piano. Starr provides score inserts for the reader to follow along with his narrative-style explanations, which include technical approaches to Ives’s use of harmony, melody, text-setting, and formal structures.

Charles Ives: “My Father’s Song” is a psychoanalytic biography by Stuart Feder, who was a psychiatrist and music scholar. Feder first encountered the music of Charles Ives in 1950 through Ives collaborator Henry Cowell, who was Feder’s professor at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. The author probes the mental life of Charles Ives to understand the meaning of his music. Throughout the book, Feder details aspects of Ives’s family, upbringing, business life, and marriage to uncover how his relationships shaped his psychology, and ultimately his compositions.

In Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music, J. Peter Burkholder presents a detailed overview of the philosophical concepts underlying Ives’s compositions. The author demonstrates how Ives’s artistic purposes evolved over the course of his lifetime, culminating in his mature period of work. Furthermore, the book examines Ives’s prose work Essays Before a Sonata as a way of charting the development of the composer’s ideas throughout his career.

Vivian Perlis’s Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History offers first-hand accounts of the composer through interviews with his family, friends, and musical collaborators. Published in 1974, this primary source book was the first oral history of an American composer. These interviews present insights into topics including Ives’s childhood, musical attitudes, personality, and early performances of his music.

In Charles Ives and His Music (1955), Henry and Sidney Cowell write a compelling account of Charles Ives’s life and creative ideals. Overall, the Cowells illustrate the principles underlying Ives’s music, and its progress toward public and critical acceptance. The second half of the book offers detailed discussions of Ives’s compositional style, examining his approach to musical elements such as polyphony, harmony, melody, and rhythm.