Next Sunday at 2 (Oct. 20, Ives’s birthday) I will present a lecture, “Thoreau’s Flute and Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata” at Henry David Thoreau’s birthplace in Concord, Massachusetts. Drawn from my upcoming book on the Concord, the talk will trace a simple argument, based on the manuscripts, that the sonata’s “Human Faith” melody was originally conceived as being Thoreau’s flute over Walden Pond, and from there made its way into the other movements of the sonata. This will be a welcome chance to present to non-musicians, and I’m enjoying my forays outside my usual professional sphere; No Such Thing as Silence gave me a chance to write about Zen, and for Essays After a Sonata I’ve enjoyed researching late-19th-century aesthetics (which I already knew a lot about) and the history of theological disputes in American protestantism. After all, I’ve been studying Transcendentalism for its own sake for many years, and have tried at every opportunity to get the administrators of Concord’s many literary museums interested in Ives. Maybe this will be my breakthrough.