Charles Ives: “My Father’s Song,” a study of the Connecticut Yankee who was part-genius, part-crank, and perhaps the non-popular American musician of the twentieth century most worth listening to, is subtitled “A Psychoanalytic Biography,” and the adjective makes one anxious. But Stuart Feder knows his music as well as he knows his psychology, and he writes with insight and, when facts are absent, a becoming modesty that make his book triumph over its style (long-winded) and its typeface (minute).

Charles Ives often said that the most important influence on his music was the example and encouragement of his father, George Ives, a professional bandmaster, and Feder, though he sees shadings in the relationship that the son repressed, agrees. The Iveses, he writes, were a “father-son pair” comparable in music “perhaps only to Mozart père et fils.” “My Father’s Song” is a double biography drawing on the son’s music, which itself drew on the experiences of both Iveses.

George Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1845, the last of five children of a banker.

George Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1845, the last of five children of a banker. George showed musical talent from an early age; when he was fifteen, he was allowed to study with a German music teacher in New York named Charles Foepple. In 1863, he became a cornet player in the band of a Connecticut artillery regiment. His time in the army was not happy—“three years servitude