Ives: Concord Sonata: Piano Sonata No. 2

by Geoffrey Block

Book Overview

Charles Ives' massive Concord Sonata, his second sonata for piano, named after the town of Concord in Massachusetts, is central to his output and clearly reflects his aesthetic perspective. Geoffrey Block's wide-ranging account of the work thus provides an ideal introduction to this fascinating composer. This handbook discusses the Sonata's reception history and its compositional genesis, as well as providing a detailed account of the work's thematic...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 052149821X
• ISBN13: 9780521498210
• Release Date: November 1996
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.3" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Ives seems to have bought the farm.

For a mystery book, this novel fails at every turn. The main character, a young boy named Charlie, begins his life growing up on a farm where his father attacks him with terrible non-harmonies and atrocities music was never intended to produce. Soon, Charlie is swept up by the idea that music need not to sound pretty, and that life be filled with hesitance and incompletion. This novel falls short when it start to focus, only a few pages in, on Charlie's Second Piano Sonata. Why the auther chose this, the most unanticipated work since Garfunkel's "Songs From a Parent to a Child", on which to base a story of suspense is beyond me. The most disappointing point to all of this is that Geoffrey Block, a man with so promising a name, could fall so far from genius. Don't let his IQ fool you.