Ives's multiverse: The Concord Sonata as American cosmology.
Item
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Title
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Ives's multiverse: The Concord Sonata as American cosmology.
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Identifier
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AAI3231936
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identifier
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3231936
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Creator
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Bruhn, Christopher Edwin.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Philip Lambert
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Date
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2006
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Music | American Studies | Literature, American
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Abstract
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In his Piano Sonata, No. 2, "Concord, Mass., 1840-60," and the accompanying prose Essays Before A Sonata, Charles Ives sets forth a view of the universe that has much in common with a number of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century literary and philosophical works that, taken together, constitute a tradition of American cosmologies. This tradition finds a prototype in Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature (1836), and achieves full flower in William James's dynamic vision of a continuously expanding "pluralistic universe," or "multiverse," of diverse yet intimately interrelated elements. James's vision is an outgrowth of his philosophical doctrine of pragmatism, the roots of which can be traced back at least as far as Emerson.;Both Emerson's and James's cosmological views resonate deeply with Ives's Concord Sonata. The genealogy of the sonata includes over a dozen unpublished versions of the work that Ives generated between the publication of the first (1921) and second (1947) editions, as well as the many Ives works to which the sonata is related. This complex web of variants of and works related to the sonata can be interpreted as forming a musical Jamesian multiverse through which performers of the work must make their way. In an appropriately pragmatic spirit, the unpublished copy of the sonata made in the 1980s by John Kirkpatrick, the pianist who premiered the sonata in 1939, proposes one way to navigate this multiverse, while explicitly encouraging each performer of the work to find his or her own way through it.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
