Ives at Century’s Turn

This chapter examines how Charles E. Ives has been affected by the transformations in American musicology over the last twenty-five years. It begins with a discussion of Maynard Solomon's accusation that Ives had engaged in a “systematic pattern of falsification” to safeguard his claims at the patent-house of musical modernism. It then considers how Solomon's criticisms served as the catalyst for an explosion of scholarly activity centered on Ives in the 1990s. In particular, it describes the approaches taken by musicologists to rebut Solomon, including those associated with “New Musicology.” It also explores the etiology of the myth that Ives was a patriarch of a lineage of composers known as the American Mavericks, along with the vicissitudes of Ives scholarship at the turn of the twentieth century.