Charles Ives

condition (records/box): NM / EX+ Insert included.

The complete symphonies of Charles Ives, documented by Columbia in a three-LP box - the label that, under the editorial direction of Goddard Lieberson, did more than any other American commercial entity to establish Ives's reputation in the postwar period. The four symphonies span thirty years of Ives's compositional life, from the First (1898-1902), still rooted in the European tradition he absorbed at Yale under Horatio Parker, to the Fourth (1910-16), a work of such structural complexity and philosophical ambition that it requires multiple conductors and was not performed complete until 1965, fifty years after its composition. Between them, the Second and Third show Ives absorbing American vernacular music - hymn tunes, marches, parlour songs - into symphonic form. A fundamental document.