Charles Ives: 'My Father's Song': By Stuart Feder. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1992. Pp. 396.

A psychoanalytic biography may be more useful for the questions it asks than for the answers it provides. Stuart Feder, by drawing attention to Charles Ives's boyhood—and in particular to his close yet conflicted

relationship with his father George—has made a major contribution to our understanding of the first great and quintessentially American composer.

What is innovative about this biography is its being two biographies in one. Dr Feder devotes the first quarter of the book to George Ives and makes a good case for how the father figured continuously in both the musical and non-musical life of the son. George had immense talent and was the explorer who stretched Charles's ears and forever represented the musical ideal in Charles's mind. An ideal and idealised figure, George also had human problems, and Feder outlines them exhaustively. Thus, we come to entertain the possibility of an unconscious ambivalence behind Charles's idolatry. George Ives was a lively and inventive band leader, a leader of men, a capable master of several intruments. Feder points out, however, that in nineteenth-century small-town America, being a musician was not a source of pride for a man and George's inability to provide adequately for his family forced him to rely—perhaps to his shame—on the mercantile prosperity of his older brothers. George's last years were probably bitter, his life without status in a provincial, small New England town.

Charles's feeling for his father was further complicated by George's sudden death during Charles's first year at Yale. The timing of his father's death, at the height of Charles's adolescent rebellion, may have exaggerated the tendency to memorialise George. Feder scrutinises Charles Ives's nostalgia and points out Ives's attachment to the nineteenth-century world of his father, despite living the majority of his life in the twentieth.

Though Ives's music was revolutionary, he was decid