Charles Ives: 129 Songs (Music of the United States of America, Volume 12)

How many songs did Charles Ives (1874-1954) write? For years the songs of this iconoclastic American composer have only been known in imperfect editions of his 114 Songs (privately printed in 1922) and two collections published in Henry Cowell's New Music series: Thirty-Four Songs (1933) and Eighteen [recte Nineteen] Songs (1935), which include mostly reprints from 114 Songs (some with revisions) plus nine new songs. Virtually every page of these three standard songbooks reveals musical and textual errors, problematic notation, and puzzling inconsistencies. The MUSA collection of 129 Songs is a critical edition of the 114 Songs, thirteen songs first published later, and two unpublished "songs without words"-in other words, all of Ives's solo songs except the fifty-four already published in critical editions by the late John Kirkpatrick (Eleven Songs and Two Harmonizations, Sunrise, and Forty Earlier Songs). The MUSA edition is based upon a comparative study of Ives's manuscript sketches and fair copies; his many copyists' scores; songs he revised for the New Music imprints; annotations by him in personal copies of those imprints and of 114 Songs; and manuscript and published text sources (by Ives, his wife Harmony Twichell Ives, and many other authors). Complete detailed critical notes and commentaries for all the songs, as opposed to the briefer "Reports" based on them that are in the published volume, can be found on the Charles Ives website (www.charlesives.org) in PDF form. Winner, Claude V. Palisca Award (for an outstanding scholarly edition) 2005, American Musicological Society. (Also listed as Volume 47 in Recent Researches in American Music.)