condition (record/cover): NM / VG+

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Charles Ives's songs - he wrote over a hundred across his lifetime - are among the most personal and formally radical things he produced, and among the least known. The American art song tradition, such as it existed, offered him almost nothing; he developed instead an approach to voice and piano that absorbed ragtime, hymn, popular song, vernacular speech rhythm, and polytonal harmony into a form that has no real precedent. The Overtone pressing documents twenty-four of them - a cross-section of a body of work that ranges from the simple and affecting to the formally extraordinary. Ives self-published a collection of 114 songs in 1922 and distributed them freely; that most of them remained unperformed for decades is one of the more dispiriting facts in the history of American music.