My Author Knew Charles Ives

If you like Charles Ives, you should track down Vivian Perlis's oral history of the man, Charles Ives Remembered, compiled from interviews she conducted at the end of the 1960s with people who knew him or worked with him. It's short and you can probably find it in a university music library. Or you can borrow the copy I impulse-bought at Powell's back in August.

The expected crusty personality emerges, along with some heavier doses of shyness or occasional conflictedness than I expected. There are great nuggets scattered throughout: a copy of an advertisement recruiting insurance salesmen that Ives placed, headlined with an Emerson quote; the reports from a West Redding, CT, barber who Ives was friendly with, who had no idea Ives was a composer until after Ives's death. Christine Loring, a onetime household secretary for Ives in West Redding, recalls:

Mr. Ives mentioned his Universe Symphony to me more than once. It was to be played by at least two huge orchestras across from each other on mountaintops overlooking a valley. It was to be religious (a paean of praise, I believe he said), and it was a real and continuing interest for years. Once after he stood looking out the picture window toward the mountains, he restlessly paced about, not conversing but as if he were thinking aloud with gestures, and humming and singing bits of music. He said, "If only I could have done it. It's all there — the mountains and the fields." When I asked him what he wanted to do, he answered, "the Universe Symphony. If only I could have done it."