Skip to main content

Distributed for ForeEdge

Mad Music

Charles Ives, the Nostalgic Rebel

Mad Music is the story of Charles Edward Ives (1874–1954), the innovative American composer who achieved international recognition, but only after he’d stopped making music. While many of his best works received little attention in his lifetime, Ives is now appreciated as perhaps the most important American composer of the twentieth century and father of the diverse lines of Aaron Copland and John Cage. Ives was also a famously wealthy crank who made millions in the insurance business and tried hard to establish a reputation as a crusty New Englander. To Stephen Budiansky, Ives’s life story is a personification of America emerging as a world power: confident and successful, yet unsure of the role of art and culture in a modernizing nation. Though Ives steadfastly remained an outsider in many ways, his life and times inform us of subjects beyond music, including the mystic movement, progressive anticapitalism, and the initial hesitancy of turn-of-the-century-America modernist intellectuals. Deeply researched and elegantly written, this accessible biography tells a uniquely American story of a hidden genius, disparaged as a dilettante, who would shape the history of music in a profound way. Making use of newly published letters—and previously undiscovered archival sources bearing on the longstanding mystery of Ives’s health and creative decline—this absorbing volume provides a definitive look at the life and times of a true American original.

324 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2014

Biography and Letters


University Press of New England image

View all books from University Press of New England

Table of Contents

Dissonance Is Like a Man • Down East Yankee Town • Scenes from My Childhood • Here’s to Good Old Yale • Damn Rot and Worse • Missionary Enterprise • A Place in the Soul • Hard Work • A Man’s Death Is More or Less a Personal Matter • Rigging Up a Concert •

Be the first to know

Get the latest updates on new releases, special offers, and media highlights when you subscribe to our email lists!

Sign up here for updates about the Press