‘Ives Thrives’ was the slogan for the 1974 Charles Ives Centennial Festival-Conference presented by H. Wiley Hitchcock and Vivian Perlis in New York and New Haven. Memories of that historic event were rekindled at the Ives Vocal Marathon: A Festival Presentation put on in memory of Hitchcock by Neely Bruce at Wesleyan University from 29 January to 1 February 2009. The complete songs of Ives were performed in six recitals over three days and if some of them called for a flute, a violin, or a string quartet, that was all provided, as were some alternative versions. The four consistently dedicated singers were Johana Arnold, Elizabeth Saunders, Gary Hager and David Barron, and Neely Bruce accompanied or conducted every single song himself. Kim Paterson took second piano and also gave an energetic performance of the Three-Page Sonata. These were idiomatic and seasoned performances in every way – Barron and Bruce first performed Ives more than forty years ago.

These songs form a kind of diary, even a confessional, ranging from sweet love-songs in a coy Victorian idiom to a piece such as ‘Majority’ where the voices are accompanied by massive tone-clusters that sound as aggressive today as when Ives provocatively placed this song first in his privately printed 114 Songs in 1922. When Ives first began to make an impact, before World War II, it was his pioneering modernism that attracted the group of young composers in New York who helped to prepare his scores and make him known. After the war this avant-garde appeal brought him to an international audience. But that was not the whole story. In 1993 forty early songs were published, all very far from the pioneering Ives and close to the idiom of the parlour song or ballad. As with Schoenberg, the early tonal works now have to be incorporated into an overall view of the composer.

Further, a new edition of 129 Songs, edited by the distinguished historian H. Wiley Hitchcock (1923–2007), came out in 2004. This is a massive 500-page tome laden with resourceful musicological apparatus but unfortunately flawed by some errors in the actual sheet music.