Charles Edward Ives Amerykański śpiew wolności

Charles E. Ives (1874–1954), an American composer – wanted to preach in music and music – freedom and truth. The essence of the composer’s outlook on the world is included in his Essays Before a Sonata, which can be interpreted as a unique composer’s treaty – the only one of its kind. Ives believed that music was an internally dialectic set of values, composed of two subsets – a higher subset of substance, and a lower subset of style or manner, a manner of expression. He wrote: “Why can’t a musical thought be presented as it is born – perchance ‘a bastard of the slums,’ or a ‘daughter of a bishop’”. Ives recalls an important thought by Ralph Emerson, the leading figure of American transcendentalism, and his spiritual mentor: “What you are talks so loud, that I cannot hear what you say?” The generation of Stalowa Wola – „new humanists” or „new romantics” – entered the ax-iological space marked by Ives’s thought: Eugeniusz Knapik (1951), Andrzej Krzanowski (1951–1990) and Aleksander Lasoń. They came back to what – after Mikhail Bakhtin and Roger Scruton – I call emotional memory; they were returning through the reception of the views of Ives and his concept of music as a set of values.