Reckoning with the Legacies of Charles Ives

content note: written discussion of relations of settler colonialism and anti-Blackness

During 2024, a profusion of discourse was produced to mark the passing of a Significant Anniversary of composer Charles Ives. Yet this discourse consistently failed to mark the settler colonial and anti-Black logics that are hidden in plain sight in his output, a pattern consistent with the reception of much music by US settler composers. For example, Ives’s song “The Indians” (collected in 114 Songs) asserts the disappearance of Indigenous peoples, with the effect of evacuating the ongoing sovereignty of hundreds of Indigenous nations colonized by the US and sanitizing the violence of the US’s ongoing colonization of these nations. In another example, tunes originally composed for Blackface minstrel shows (in which Ives occasionally participated as a performer) appear throughout Ives’s output; following the important scholarship of Matthew D. Morrison, this (literal) facelift transforms the signifiers of minstrelsy from blackface to blacksound, but without challenging the genre’s underlying anti-Blackness. Yet these are only symptoms of more pervasive anti-Black and settler colonial logics that subtend Ives’s music, for instance, even when it does not explicitly depict Indigeneity or Blackness, such as in A Symphony: New England Holidays, with its consolidation of colonizer (“New England”) geography through a celebration of the most pernicious colonizer holidays, from “Washington’s Birthday” (memorializing genocidaire-enslaver George Washington) to “Thanksgiving and Forefathers’ Day” (the latter commemorating the pilgrims’ illegal invasion of land known colonially as Plymouth, Massachusetts). These features suggest that Ives’s approaches to land, place, and US nation may be inseparable from colonial and anti-Black logics.

These troubling patterns suggests the urgent need for those who perform, teach, and write around the compositions and legacies of Ives to pursue the following lines of inquiry:

1. What is the extent of settler colonial and anti-Black logics in his music, and in the normative ways in which it is interpreted by performers and listeners?
2. If problematic features are identified in a piece, how might one engage with this piece without reiterating its anti-Blackness and settler coloniality? 

These inquiries must be pursued in ways that are meaningfully grounded in Indigenous and Black analytics—such as social movement vernaculars, artistic interventions, and concepts from fields like Indigenous and Black studies—and specifically analytics capable of positioning the concerning examples mentioned above not as aberrations, but as manifestations of broader anti-Black settler atmospheres, to adopt the analytics of Black studies scholar Christina Sharpe and Indigenous studies scholar Kristen Simmons (Moapa Band of Southern Paiutes).

With respect to the second line of inquiry, there are numerous models for what this course of action might entail, such as scholarship that critiques white settler cultural production through Indigenous and Black studies analytics. For performances of this music, a simple printed disclaimer, for instance, will not do nearly enough to defuse the considerable rhetorical force of the music; instead a more radical approach might be required, such as a performance practice which exceeds the boundaries of “compliant” performance or even of concert music presentation protocols. Relevant precedents include the long history of jazz/creative musicians’ critical engagements with white(-coded) musical materials, and xwélmexw artist, curator and writer Dylan Robinson’s (Stó:lō/Skwah Nations) decolonial event scores, particularly those oriented around non-compliant performances of existing pieces.

In short, I am arguing that if you want to deal with Ives at all, you need to be engaged rigorously with Indigenous and Black analytics, particularly if you are non-Indigenous and non-Black. While concerns about positionality and power might occasion hesitation with respect to this avenue of action, these concerns should be invoked neither as an excuse for shielding anti-Black and anti-Indigenous music from critique, nor as an excuse for ignoring relevant Indigenous and Black knowledge production. Instead, concerns about issues of positionality and power should be directed into the making and refining of protocols for, in this instance, position- and power-sensitive ways for, say, non-Indigenous people to engage with Indigenous studies analytics. There is a growing body of writing about these kinds of protocols, which I survey and discuss in my text “On Positionality.”

Ultimately, Ives is less a “bad apple” than an influential threshold figure within the politically disastrous field of US settler (art) music whose very consistency is inseparable from the norming of historically European (i.e. invading) musical frameworks on Turtle Island, an obsession with possessive figurations of Indigenous Lands, a preoccupation with appropriating and exoticizing-minstrelizing historically Black musics, and a white-/art-washing of the extremely violent history of the US anti-Black settler imperial project, among many other disturbing and ongoing patterns. The question, then, is how Ives, as a threshold figure, might offer strategic entry points towards the dismantling of this field.