Kevin Oliver Kelly, Ph.D. 1988

Advisor: Thomas Warburton

Dissertation Title: The Songs of Charles Ives and the Cultural Contexts of Death

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Dissertation Abstract:

Death is only one of a number of topics encountered in the total output of songs by Ives. Yet to Ives death was an important subject, as demonstrated by his many songs in which it finds reference. This dissertation surveys the cultural phenomenon of death in America from the middle decades of the nineteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth, providing a fitting cultural context for the study of Ives’s selection and musical treatment of death song texts. For while Ives’s music in many cases is quite individual and innovative, his texts are often retrospective, mirroring situations and attitudes prevalent in an earlier era. In addition to nostalgia, Ives shared with Victorian Americans a tendency to idealize concepts such as the afterlife (by viewing it as a place of rest, reunion, and a perfection of the domestic sphere) and beauty (frequently correlating it with melancholy, the redemptive role of women, the innocence of children, or the sustaining power of Nature). Concepts such as these—all of which appear in Ives’s songs—facilitated human efforts to deal with the larger and less comprehensible issue of death. Ives’s songs involving death and these related subjects exhibit a considerable range of style and points of view, with regard to both their texts and music. Through these various, even conflicting approaches, Ives presents death as a multifaceted subject that reflects his broad, all-encompassing view of life itself.