Now I see my folly in signing up for "American Innovators". As the one musicology student in this musicological course, I alone will be expected to have reviewed the entire scholarly literature upon these compositional figures before I am to post entirely new and hitherto unthought ideas about them. And just to grace a lousy blog. Oh, my aching back...

Nonetheless, when I ponder a remarkable figure such as Charles Ives, I cannot help but have thoughts about him and his work, though their entire newness and hitherto unthoughtedness cannot be assured, pending that aforementioned exhaustive literature review.

I have read the assigned Robt P. Morgan article, and found it interesting, not least for the unsupportable howlers he writes on his way into his discussion of Ives. Like what? one might ask. Well, his bold assertions about the historical overview of the just-buried century contain some whoppers, such as "historians have failed to keep abreast of today's rapidly changing musical environment and to evaluate the implications of that environment." I, for one, would not ask historians to keep me on top of "today's rapidly changing enivronment", musical or otherwise. That is what we pay journalists to do. Let some time pass and some dust to settle, then and only then can historians make any sense of what had happened before.

Shortly after, Morgan then writes "the past needs to be brought more clearly in line with the musical present." I cannot help but wonder if Morgan thought to read what he had just written, for such a patent piece of balderdash is startling to find in the scholarly literature. How could one possibly propose to accomplish such a task, seeing as how the past always just sits there being done and over. One can demand that the past struggle to meet the requirements of the present, if one is fond of flailing uselessly, because the past will not comply. It is the present that will always have to do the adjusting to the past, because it is nothing more than the infintesimal border between the past and the future. Since the latter does not exist, the past is all we have, which is why historians struggle to get it right - they know we have nothing else.
Having ripped Morgan a new one, I should note the good sense he showed when he got around to discussing Ives. He dwelled at length upon Ives' use of quotation, though his stubborn sense of the vernacular or hymnal material as "quotes" seems to me to fail somewhat to appreciate Ives' use of these melodies as thematic material to be pondered and developed. Ives' Second Symphony does not simply "quote" "Turkey in the Straw", it uses that melody as a basis for compositional insights, much as any classic or romantic composer would have done.
Gotta go teach class. Maybe I'll get to rave a little more on this topic...