Creating Space
Jennifer Iverson · Music Theory Online · 2011
Charles’s Ives’s collages, such as “Putnam’s Camp,”The Fourth of July, and selected movements of theFourth Symphony, present listeners with extraordinarily complex sound environments. This article uses Albert Bregman’sAuditory Scene Analysisas a source for methodology to analyze how listeners may parse and organize the chaotic surface of a musical collage. Since scene analysis problems in Ives’s collages often mimic real-world environments, Ives creates music that seems “spatial” or “pictorial” as a result. Finally, the article compares and contrasts the perception of space in Ives’s musical collages with their historical parallel in visual art, Cubist collage.