Primary Format: E-book | |
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ISBN: | 9781611685145 |
Published: | 04/01/2014 |
Pages: | 324 |
Size: | 6 x 9 in. |
Subject(s): | Music Biography and Letters |
A superb and genial biography of Charles Ives.
—Washington Post
[An] excellent new biography ... The facts are amazing- there aren’t that many insurance tycoons doubling as undiscovered modernist geniuses-and the difficulty of writing Ives’s biography is to prevent the life from sliding into myth. Budiansky tells the story movingly but plainly.
—New York Review of Books
Stephen Budiansky’s Mad Music is a first-rate introduction geared to the general public. . . . Mr. Budiansky lures the reader into the mystery of Ives’s life, and the eccentric power of his music, in prose free from jargon and pretense. . . [An] engaging portrait.
—Wall Street Journal
Eminently insightful and engagingly written. . . . The content and style of this exhaustively researched biography combine to provide a compelling narrative of a unique figure. . . . Highly recommended.
—Choice
This is a brilliantly written biography of Charles Ives. The author’s extraordinary research has yielded fresh and very important insights into the battle between the composer’s health and musical creations. Ives has never before seemed so human, so real. This is a magnificent biography of Ives, one to join and amplify the fine biographies done in the late 20th century. It’s absorbing reading for the general public and has significant new information for music scholars.
—James Sinclair, Music Director, Orchestra New England
STEPHEN BUDIANSKY is the author of numerous books of history, biography, and popular science including Blackett’s War (2013) and Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II (2000). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, American Heritage, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to research the life of Charles Ives.