Ives: Songs, Vol. 3

85 years later and, for all that his wider reputation rests on orchestral, chamber and piano music, it is the songs that represent the heart of his creative thinking. Nor was that initial volume comprehensive; Ives having written almost 200 songs, of which this present edition includes all those that he completed. The expressive variety encountered is accordingly vast: indeed, the gradual evolution of Ives's songwriting, from those drawing overtly on the Austro-German Lieder and English parlour-song tradition to ones that evince anarchic humour as keenly as others do profound vision, is analogous to the evolution of American music over the last quarter of the nineteenth and first quarter of the twentieth centuries.

Although it would be possible to collate Ives's songs according to type, the alphabetic approach adopted by this edition ensures each volume (of which this is the third) contains a cross-section of his achievement. A wide range of poets is set (Ives could be highly interventionist in others' verse), including a number of (mainly early) German settings as well as forays into French and Italian writers. Whatever else, the temporal distance (1887-1926) traversed by these songs is as little compared to their stylistic diversity and also their emotional range.