Influence, Innovation, and Structure: Modernist Evaluative Criteria in the Reception Histories of Charles Ives and Jean Sibelius
Abstract
In 1987, Maynard Solomon published an article titled “Charles Ives: Some
Questions of Veracity,” which challenged the priority and probity of Charles Ives’s
technical innovations and ignited a scholarly firestorm. Nearly twenty years later, John
McGinness ruminated on the uproar, asking, “While unquestionably of historical
importance, why, in our postmodern times, should dating and/or the addition of
dissonance play a crucial role in the critical evaluation of Ives’s music?” McGinness
continued by questioning the effects of what he called “Modernist Criticism” on Ives
studies and concluded by problematizing its usefulness to evaluations of Ives’s music.
This thesis continues the conversation that McGinness began. First, I broaden his
discussion to include the reception history of Jean Sibelius and recent contributions to
Sibelius studies, for throughout their respective reception histories, the musics of Ives and
Sibelius have been particularly vulnerable to negative valuations based on modernist
criticism. Next, I borrow Richard Taruskin’s definition of modernist criticism, which he
describes as comprising three tenets: influence, innovation, and structure. Taruskin’s
three tenets serve as the subjects of the central chapters of this thesis, each of which seeks
to outline the origin of its subject as a criterion of musical evaluation in eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century German philosophy and to sketch a brief narrative of its application to
the reception histories of Ives and Sibelius in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Finally, I explore the ramifications of modernist aesthetic assumptions that the parallels
and similarities in the reception histories of Ives and Sibelius reveal.
My research continues a budding tradition that examines and uncovers the biases
musicologists bring into their discipline. My purpose is to demonstrate the pervasiveness
of modernist criticism in musicology and the related fields of theory and criticism and to
challenge influence, innovation, and structure as evaluative criteria in the reception
histories of Ives and Sibelius.
Table of Contents
Introduction -- Influence -- Innovation -- Structure -- Epilogue
Degree
M.M.