ABSTRACT
There are several ways one might go about revealing connections between Ives and the European past. Ives's work represents an extension of European conceptions of tonal and rhythmic structure, or indicate how earlier European composers anticipate techniques that reappear later—usually in a more intensified and exaggerated form—in Ives. Mahler was a composer totally immersed in the European tradition—indeed, one sometimes feels that his music is almost overwhelmed by that tradition. Although Mahler was some fourteen years older than Ives, and Ives lived some forty years after Mahler's death, the two were almost exact compositional contemporaries: their principal works were all conceived within a thirty-year period extending from 1888 to 1918. The moment-to-moment succession of their music sounds very different, then; Mahler is as unmistakably Austrian as Ives is American. Ives and Mahler approached the problem from an entirely different direction.
