A composer himself, Swafford proves to be an astute and sympathetic interpreter in the first-rate Charles Ives: A Life With Music (525 pages. Norton. $30). Equally important, he knows his way around American culture–an indispensable trait when it comes to explaining Ives, who was after nothing less than a musical equivalent of that culture in his compositions. For example, much of the chapter on Ives’s father, a Danbury bandleader, is spent discussing the role that marching bands played in small-town New England life in the late 19th century. This is not as much of a detour as it 74 Joyful noise: The composer, 68, in Redding Conn., in 1942 sounds: George Ives, the youngest band-leader in the Civil War, was his son’s greatest musical influence (dad would often order son to play a song in one key and sing it in another), and band music would fascinate Charles all his life. Pausing to explain everything from transcendentalist thought to the workings of the insurance industry, Swafford gives us not only a portrait of Ives but a vivid picture of his world.
Neither a Romantic nor a modernist, Ives was, according to Swafford, “a composer without a milieu.” During the height of his creativity, he was either ignored or reviled by the musical establishment, scorn that he had been returning in kind since suffering the orthodoxies of the Yale music faculty as an undergraduate. “New York theater musicians would get to be familiar with Ives,” Swafford writes in one of his book’s more chilling passages. “He was the guy who appeared at the edge of the pit after the show and handed you cash on the spot to read through his crazy mu-sic. No doubt they considered him another fruitcake among many, but his money was real enough.” And while he did enjoy some renown before his death in 1954 (in 1947 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his third symphony, $0 years after it was finished), the acclaim came too late. By then the indifference of his peers, coupled with failing health, had worn down even this maverick. In the last three decades of his life, he composed almost nothing.
Ives will never appeal to millions, but his music is taken up with increasing enthusiasm. The Bard Music Festival in Annandale, N.Y., devoted two weeks to Ives this summer, and lately orchestras have even attempted his unfinished, chaotic Universe Symphony. This is no accident, Swafford argues. As we seek to escape the philosophical wreckage of modernism and the cheap ironies of postmodernism, Ives’s individualism and idealism sounds increasingly appealing. He was a believer-in love, in spiritual and moral progress, in God and, most of all, in music. “Ives’s way of expressing his faith has led some to call him naive, pathetic, even dishonest,” Swafford says. “He was none of those things. He was earnest, exceptionally generous, boundlessly optimistic, a born genius, a great man.” In Swag-ford, Ives got the biographer he deserves. Thoughtful, witty, instructive, this is one of the best biographies in recent memory, as warm and strangely inspiring as the man and the music it describes.
CONTRARY TO MYTH, THE INTERNET was not created by the Defense Department during the cold war as a strikeproof communications network in case of nuclear attack. Such scenarios aren’t half as interesting as the real ones. NEWSWEEK Contributing Editor Katie Hafner and her husband, Matthew Lyon, tell the whole story in Where Wizzards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (304 pages. Simon & Schuster. $24). Their account offers an intimate view into how nontechnical factors-the pressure to justify funding, personality quirks, chance meetings-affected the way the global network works today.
