Neely Bruce first encountered the vocal music of Charles Ives as a freshman at the Eastman School of Music, when he accompanied Sylvia Anderson in "Evening." He played a few more songs in undergraduate school at the University of Alabama. In 1966, he entered graduate school at the University of Illinois, and in the late sixties began to work on Ives with his office mate, baritone, David Barron. They began to present all-Ives programs and other recitals featuring this extraordinary repertory of songs, and in July of 1969, they presented the earliest documented performance of "August." In 1972, as part of the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, they presented the first major performance of Ives' songs in Poland, the second half of a concert which opened with John Ogden playing the "Concord" Sonata. Over the years, Neely continued to perform the vocal music of Ives with his wife, Phyllis Bruce, the American Music/Theater Group (AM/TG presented an all-Ives and Foster program at the Bushnell in the early 1980s), and other soloists and ensembles. His paper comparing "114 songs of Ives" and the colletion of Stephen Foster songs known as the "Morrison Foster Songbook" was published in the proceedings of the 1974 Ives Festival-Conference, "An Ives Celebration." In the summer of 2004, the long-awaited critical edition of the bulk of Ives' vocal output, "129 Songs," was published by MUSA (Music of the United States of America). Masterfully edited by H. Wiley Hitchcock, and exhaustive in its detailed treatment of Ives' many musical eccentricities, this volume, with the critical editions of early and miscellaneous songs by John Kirkpatrick and James Sinclair ("Forty Early Songs, Eleven Songs, and Two Harmonizations") makes it possible for Bruce to produce a complete Charles Ives song series, up-to-date, full of surprises, and drawing on forty-five years of experience with this repertory -- THE IVES VOCAL MARATHON.
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Ah, Charles Ives is such an important composer for me...Still an exception. I have an hard time connecting on a truly spiritual level with most "serious composers" of our last century.
Charles Ives was the first real American composer--totally unique unto himself. What Walt Whitman did for poetry, Ives did for music. I performed "Circus Band" for my college recital. I am thrilled to see that there are performers dedicated to the preservation and celebration of this man's genius!
