ABSTRACT
The nature of the raw material of Charles Ives's art can be most conveniently examined in his numerous songs, which he produced intermittently throughout his working life from around 1890 to the early 1920s; and which served in part as sketches—or annotations of experience—to be explored in large-scale works. In General William Booth enters Heaven—a setting of part of Vachel Lindsey's poem—the moments of reality which he re-creates in songs like In the Cage or Soliloquy are used cumulatively to evoke a scene, a man, a human situation. The American obsession with childhood complements, after all, the Puritan sense of guilt, which probably entered Ives's music by the back door. The more immediate his response to the external world, the more he had to seek a transcendental reality beyond the flux. Each one of the heroes is an aspect of Ives's own character.
