Charles Ives thought deeply about time, as evidenced by its many mentions in his writings and music.Footnote ¹ With a few exceptions, however, the subjects of time and temporality in Ives's music have received scant attention in the scholarly literature in contrast to voluminous writings about his use of musical borrowing, his biography, and his compositional innovations.Footnote ²

Matthew McDonald's recent book, Breaking Time's Arrow: Experiment and Expression in the Music of Charles Ives, published in the Indiana University Press series Musical Meaning and Interpretation, begins to fill this scholarly gap. McDonald, an associate professor of music at Northeastern University, argues in the book's introduction that Ives's music “strives to master time, to move freely among past, present, and future, and even to bring time to a halt, while at the same time revealing the difficulties of this endeavor. . . . Simply put, Ives needed to reconceive the temporality of music” (9). In other words, Ives treats temporality in his music differently than other composers; instead of presenting a linear, teleological path governed by tonality or melody, Ives's music is more fragmented and often lacks traditional markers of unity and coherence in ways that call for different modes of hearing and analysis—hence the title of the book, Breaking Time's Arrow.

McDonald views temporality in Ives's music through the lens of what he calls “multidirectional motion,” whereby listeners hear the music operating in multiple temporal layers, moving in different directions (back and forth) instead of in a strict chronology. Indeed, there is a flexible and multidirectional “flow” to time in Ives's music that incorporates elements of the past (e.g., borrowed hymn tunes from the early nineteenth century), present (e.g., borrowings from contemporary popular styles like ragtime), and future (e.g., modernist harmonic language)—often in the same piece. Of course, not everything that Ives wrote functions this way (much of it is linear), but McDonald suggests that multidirectional motion may explain how we can reconceptualize fractured and fragmented musical successions in Ives's music in more unified terms.

Breaking Time's Arrow is organized into two large parts, each of which is comprised of three chapters of supporting analyses. The first part, “Three Dualities,” explores the broad relationship between eternity and time, more specifically between God and man (chapter 1), community and the individual (chapter 2), and intuition and expression (chapter 3). The second part of the book shifts the focus to “Contexts and Methodologies,” which applies multidirectional motion to the interpretation of Ives's programmatic conceptions in individual pieces: The Unanswered Question (chapter 4), “The Things Our Fathers Loved” (chapter 5); and the Concord Sonata (chapter 6).

In chapter 1, McDonald analyzes two of Ives's early sacred choral works, I Come to Thee (ca. 1896–97) and Psalm 14 (ca. 1902). In his analysis of I Come to Thee, McDonald demonstrates how, even within the context of a fairly traditional, tonal, nineteenth-century Protestant hymn structure, Ives uses striking chromaticism and tonal shifts, text painting, and interpolations as disruptions to express temporal relationships (past, present, future, and eternity) that a listener can potentially hear chronologically or as reconfigured retrospectively using multidirectional motion. As McDonald shows, Psalm 14 relates to I Come to Thee textually, in its move from sin to salvation (and from separation to “ultimate union” with God), as well as musically, in Ives's unique setting of each verse with the use of two separated choirs.

The duality of “Community/Individual” is addressed next, in chapter 2, where McDonald looks at two instrumental pieces: the First Piano Sonata and the Second String Quartet. In his analysis of the piano sonata, a fascinating piece that has not received as much attention as has its successor (the Concord Sonata), McDonald traces how Ives derives some of the ragtime material in the inner movements from his Four Ragtime Dances and weaves in hymn tunes to present another duality: the sacred (hymns) and the secular (ragtime). For his analysis of the Second String Quartet, McDonald focuses on key relations and tonal structure to present a hypothetical temporal path based on the titles of the three movements: “Arguments” in the first movement lead backward to “Discussions” in the second, which then culminate in future events in “The Call of the Mountains.”

McDonald turns in chapter 3 to the concepts of intuition, in which he draws on Emerson to define ideas that are “God-given, and thus eternally true,” and expression, which he defines as as “the means by which an intuition is translated into art” (17). McDonald applies Ives's aesthetic ideas to identify the sources of inspiration and expression in two songs: “Nov. 2, 1920” and “Grantchester.” Whereas McDonald's analysis of “Nov. 2, 1920” sheds light on the stylistic heterogeneity found in the song, his analysis of “Grantchester” (1920) is less convincing in its conclusions (86–99). The song's Debussy quotations, drawn from the first five measures of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun are clearly audible and intentional (Ives even marks their placement in the score), but McDonald's assertions about Wagner quotations from the Prelude to Tristan and Isolde are more tenuous. Although we know that Wagner influenced Debussy and that both composers influenced Ives, the assertion that Ives included in “Grantchester” two literal borrowings from Tristan, one harmonic (a half-diminished seventh chord resolving to a major-minor seventh chord) and one melodic (on the text “Naiad's reedy head”), is not clearly supported.Footnote ³

McDonald employs alternative analytical strategies, including narrative and film theory, to support his musical interpretations in the second part of the book, which also consists of three chapters, two of which have been published previously. In chapter 4, “Elements of Narrative,” McDonald analyzes temporality in The Unanswered Question in two different ways, chronologically and linearly, while in chapter 5, “Ives and the Now,” McDonald presents multiple temporal paths through one of Ives's most famous and studied songs, “The Things Our Fathers Loved.”Footnote ⁴

McDonald saves his most cogent analysis for the final chapter, entitled “Cumulative Composition: Ives's Emerson Music.” Here he traces the history, development, and changing conception of “Emerson,” the first movement of the Concord Sonata, from its earliest stages as an overture to recordings Ives himself made from 1933 to 1938. The chapter weaves sketch study together with musical analysis in ways that will be useful for anyone who studies or performs the Concord Sonata. In the chapter's conclusion, McDonald speculates that Ives's “continual reworking of the Emerson music over the decades was not a march toward some definitive creative achievement, but rather the work of a wistful yet determined composer seeking to capture a past intuition and bring it back to life” (168). As such, Ives's whole working method resembles a cumulative form that begins with an initial spark (or “substance”), undergoes substantial development and reworking, and then comes together at the end in an assembly of fragments that lead toward a loftier artistic vision. Although cumulative form in Ives's music has been discussed extensively, McDonald's expansion of the idea to encompass Ives's life and compositional method serves as this book's most salient and powerful observation.

Overall, McDonald's book is a useful contribution to Ives scholarship, particularly with its analyses of the dualities that complement Ives's own “substance” and “manner,” its implementation of alternative analytical strategies, and its comprehensive account of the compositional process of “Emerson.”Footnote ⁵ Moreover, the book lays a solid foundation for further investigations of temporality in Ives's music, which might, for example, use the conclusions and approaches described here to explore the temporal effects of Ives's musical borrowing in greater depth—a topic that needs additional attention. Given its emphasis on multidirectional time and alternate temporal readings, Breaking Time's Arrow may also appeal to scholars who study musical meaning as well as time and temporality in other twentieth-century music.