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In Pursuit of "The Walden State-of-Mind": Henry David Thoreau in Charles Ives's Music

Fuller, Rachael. Anora
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9475-5644
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1428944240

Abstract Details

2015, MA, Kent State University, College of the Arts / School of Music, Hugh A. Glauser.
Charles Ives considered each one of the New England Transcendentalists heroes, having grown up reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and many other staples of the New England classics. Of all of the Transcendentalists, Thoreau was the writer whom Ives related to the most. His time in solitude in a cabin near Walden Pond fascinated the young Charlie, who read Walden with his father as a boy in Danbury, Connecticut. This thesis explores Ives’s use of Thoreau in his compositions. The thesis itself is divided into two different parts: the first two chapters explore Ives’s connections with New England Transcendentalism, his view of a pastoral ideal, and Thoreau’s Walden, while Chapters 3, 4, and 5 include my own analyses of each piece that I chose to represent Thoreau. I started this process by analyzing Ives’s Concord Sonata, piecing important motives together. Then, I explored different sources, such as Ives’s Memos and Essays Before a Sonata, J. Peter Burkholder’s All Made of Tunes, and Stuart Feder’s “’Thoreau Was Definitely There’: The Ives-Thoreau Connection” from Thoreau’s World and Ours. Feder’s article, which includes speculation of “Thoreau” pieces in a psychoanalytical and musicological light, provided me with a guide of which pieces to include. I analyzed each of these pieces in many different ways and concluded that through text, musical borrowing, motivic patterns, use of color, and Transcendental undertones, there are connections between these pieces. Through this, I analyzed other pieces to search for more connections to Thoreau, concluding that Thoreau is connected to many of Ives’s works.
Richard Devore (Advisor)
Frank Wiley (Committee Member)
Theodore Albrecht (Committee Member)
123 p.
Music
charles ives, ives, henry david thoreau, thoreau, american music, new england transcendentalism, music theory, music history

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Fuller, R. A. (2015). In Pursuit of "The Walden State-of-Mind": Henry David Thoreau in Charles Ives's Music [Master's thesis, Kent State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1428944240

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Fuller, Rachael. In Pursuit of "The Walden State-of-Mind": Henry David Thoreau in Charles Ives's Music. 2015. Kent State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1428944240.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Fuller, Rachael. "In Pursuit of "The Walden State-of-Mind": Henry David Thoreau in Charles Ives's Music." Master's thesis, Kent State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1428944240

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

kent1428944240
416
© 2015, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License In Pursuit of "The Walden State-of-Mind": Henry David Thoreau in Charles Ives's Music by Rachael. Anora Fuller is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by Kent State University and OhioLINK.