Completing Ives's Universe Symphony: An Interview with Larry Austin

By Zachary Lyman


ZL: What got you started on the Universe Symphony in the first place? How did you first hear about it and what got you going on it?

LA: A couple of books. As a student here at North Texas, in fact, I had always been dedicated to the weird and wild music of Charles Ives. Mainly in the library here, in the late '40s and early '50s, we had the songs which he himself had published and sent around to various libraries around the country. I'm not sure how they got there but probably they sent off for it, probably at no cost. That and the Concord Sonata which had finally been published. That was the early period of the long-playing record, too, so they could put these things on LP. All the webern works, for example, were on LP so we were exposed suddenly to all these pieces that one never heard live. So, I've always been dedicated to his music and a lot of it I saw in the New Music Quarterly of Henry Cowell. In fact Ives, as you know, was an angel for the New music Society in San Francisco, which was founded by Henry Cowell, and also an angel for the publications. So that accounts for a few of Ives's pieces being in that journal. Iit just turned out to be a model for my own journal in the '60s: Source magazine.