Paul explores both how Ives positioned his music amid changing philosophical and aesthetic currents and how others interpreted his contributions to American music. Although Ives's initial efforts to find a public in the early twenties attracted a few devotees, the resurgence of interest in the American literary past during the thirties made a concert staple of his "Concord" Sonata, a work dedicated to nineteenth-century transcendentalist writers. Paul shows how Ives was subsequently deployed as an icon of American freedom during the early Cold War period and how he came to be instigated at the head of a line of "American maverick" composers. Paul also examines why a recent cadre of scholars has beset the composer with Gilded Age social anxieties.

By embedding Ives' reception within the changing developments of a wide range of fields including intellectual history, American studies, literature, musicology, and American politics and society in general, Charles Ives in the Mirror: American Histories of an Iconic Composer greatly advances our understanding of Ives and his influence on nearly a century of American culture.

With this book, Joseph Kerman establishes the place of music study firmly in the mainstream of modern intellectual history. He treats not only the study of the history of Western art music—with which musicology is traditionally equated—but also sometimes vexed relations between music history and other fields: music theory and analysis, ethnomusicology, and music criticism.

Kerman sees and applauds a change in the study of music toward a critical orientation. As examples, he presents fascinating vignettes of Bach research in the 1950s and Beethoven studies in the 1960s. He sketches the work of prominent scholars and theorists: Thurston Dart, Charles Rosen, Leonard B. Meyer, Heinrich Schenker, Milton Babbit, and many others. And he comments on such various subjects as the amazing absorption of Stephen Foster’s songs into the canons of “black” music, the new intensity of Verdi research, controversies about performance on historical instruments, and the merits and demerits of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Contemplating Music is filled with wisdom and trenchant commentary. It will spark controversy among musicologists of all stripes and will give many musicians and amateurs an entirely new perspective on the world of music.

Current Thought in Musicology covers a variety of topics, ranging from the Middle Ages to the present and touching on all the major disciplines of musicology: music history, theory and composition, music education, and performance. Taken together, the nine papers constitute a broad overview of the direction of music scholarship in the 1970s.

In “Tractatus Esthetico-Semioticus: Model of the Systems of Human Communication,” Charles Seeger presents a model of the situations in which the study of humanistic art may best be conducted. Charles Hamm writes in “The Ecstatic and the Didactic: A Pattern in American Music” of the pattern of conflicting points of view in music history and theory. American composer Elliott Carter, in his chapter titled “Music and the Time Screen,” presents a lucid explanation of his compositional process, including his concept of musical time. In “Instruments and Voices in the Fifteenth-Century Chanson,” Howard Mayer Brown suggests the nature of fifteenth-century performance, drawn from iconography and various musical sources. “Nottebohm Revisited,” by Lewis Lockwood, reexamines Beethoven’s sketchbooks, showing the extent to which performing editions of his work must be updated. Daniel Heartz’s article, “The Chanson in the Humanist Era,” is multidisciplinary and will interest a variety of scholars, including French historians and French literary historians. Gilbert Chase applies structuralism to musicological studies in his chapter, “Musicology, History, and Anthropology: Current Thoughts.” The concluding essays, “The Prospects for Research in Medieval Music in the 1970’s,” by Gilbert Reaney, and “The Library of the Mind: Observations on the Relationship between Musical Scholarship and Bibliography,” by Vincent Duckles, provide a unique view of the opportunities for further work in these areas.

The volume also includes an introduction by the editor, notes on the contributors, and an index. Current Thought in Musicology is the result of a symposium held at the University of Texas at Austin in 1971.