Book Review

Charles Ives: 129 Songs. By H. Wiley Hitchcock. Middleton, Wis.: A-R -Editions, Inc., 2004. ISBN 0-89579-524-8 (pbk.). Pp. lxxi, 9 plates, 527. $250.

H. Wiley Hitchcock was introduced to Charles Ives’s songs over fifty years ago in one of those rare American music courses offered in the late 1940s. The meeting was propitious. From his earliest publications on the repertoire in the 1960s and 1970s to 129 Songs, which appeared in July of 2004, Hitchcock has lived with and in Ives’s world of song as few others have. He brings that long experience and intimate knowledge to this critical edition, and invites us to confront Ives’s songs once again.