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Charles Ives and Arnold Schoenberg, both of whom turn 150 years old this year, are the most important composers of their generation produced by Austro/Germany and the US.   Though Ives was said by some to “know his Schoenberg,” he plausibly denied it. Schoenberg, however, paid sufficient attention to Ives to have written a magnificent encomium: “There is a great man living … [Read more...] about Ives and Schoenberg Turn 150 — and the Road Not Taken

In celebration of the Charles Ives Sesquicentenary, I’ve written a long piece on Ives and Gustav Mahler for The American Scholar. The topic is not new: these composers quite obviously have in common a radical propensity to juxtapose the quotidian with the sublime – parade bands and tuneful ditties with the most rarefied metaphysical strivings. But my perspective is, I think, … [Read more...] about Mahler, Ives, and Today’s Cultural Memory Crisis

In 1951, Leonard Bernstein, age 32, led the New York Philharmonic in the belated world premiere of Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 2 – music composed half a century earlier. The performance was nationally broadcast and widely noticed. Seven years after that, Bernstein began his tenure as the Philharmonic’s music director with Ives’ Second Symphony. In all, he performed Ives’ … [Read more...] about The Bernstein Story Not Told in “Maestro” — Take Four: What Happened to Charles Ives?

According to a well-worn anecdote, Johannes Brahms was heard to say: “I’ll never write a symphony, you have no idea what it feels like to hear the footsteps of a giant behind one” – the giant being Beethoven. And Brahms was all of 43 years old when he finished his First Symphony, whose finale alludes to Beethoven’s Ninth. If Brahms in fact felt intimidated by his mighty … [Read more...] about The Bernstein Story Not Told in “Maestro” — Take Three: Bernstein, Furtwängler, and Saying What You Think

J. Edgar Hoover When Jamie Bernstein told me about her father’s FBI file – and its disclosure of hate mail and picketers generated by the FBI in 1970, in the wake of the Bernsteins’ Black Panthers fundraiser -- I was impressed but unsurprised. A year before, J. Edgar Hoover had called the Black Panther Party "the greatest threat to the internal security of the … [Read more...] about The Bernstein Story Not Told in “Maestro” – Take Two