Charles Ives

condition (record/cover): NM / NM (in shrink)

A pairing that documents the full arc of Charles Ives's symphonic development. Symphony No. 1 (1898-1902), written at Yale under Horatio Parker's supervision, is Ives at his most conventional - fluent, European, a student's demonstration of mastery. Then Three Places In New England (1903-14), subtitled A New England Symphony, shows what Ives became when he left the academy behind: three movements evoking a Boston memorial to Black Civil War soldiers, a Revolutionary War encampment in Putnam, and a remembered trip along the Housatonic River - memory, landscape, and American history rendered in music that layers irreconcilable elements simultaneously. The gap between the two works, separated by barely a decade, is one of the most startling in American music. On Columbia.