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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article review. Please do not modify it. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page or at Wikipedia talk:Featured article review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was removed 19:35, 13 October 2007.

Charles Ives

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Review commentary

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Alerted nominator, 1st FAR reviewers, WP:Bio, WP:CT, WP:Composers.
1st FAR of Charles Ives

Second FAR nomination. 80% of this article is missing citations. There are numerous one-sentence paragraphs, which are inconsistent with the giant paragraphs at the top. The lead had also not been brought up to date with WP:LEAD. This article could eventually be fixed, but it is not updated frequently enough for me to believe this is going to happen. MrPrada 08:34, 21 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Please notify major editors and relevant WikiProjects as stated in the instructions for WP:FAR. Please indicate your notifications below the title of this page. Thanks. --RelHistBuff 09:45, 21 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, ignore that. I see it got done just as I posted it. Thanks. --RelHistBuff 09:47, 21 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

FARC commentary

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Suggested FA criteria concerns are citations (1c), LEAD (2a), prose structure (1a). Marskell 09:01, 10 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The biggest problem for me is not whether the article complies with WP rules or not, it's the lack of substantive discussion of musical style (with musical examples), and of the question of his revision and datings of works. The Grove dictionary entry, for instance, uses five examples as illustrations of style and innovation. There are little interjections here and there that are largely irrelevant ("William Schuman arranged this for orchestra in 1964.") and the "Reception" section is almost a bulleted list of increasingly unimportant moments in reception history, and full of weasel words ("Some find his music bombastic and pompous. Others find it, strangely enough, timid." Who?). FAs like Lutoslawski and Messiaen show the standard to which we should hold FA-class articles on twentieth-century composers. Ives is probably a more significant composer than either of these two and his article should be at least as good or better to be a FA. I'm sorry to lose a classical music FA, but I think this needs major improvement to be retained. -- Myke Cuthbert (talk) 20:13, 14 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  • Well, you have your opinion on comparisons between composers; I wouldn't express mine here. Remove—1a, 1c, 2a. I'm suspicious of the "modernist classical" label at the top. "American Originals" needs a citation, or at least an explicit agent. Unencyclopedic attitudinal statements such as "which seems as mysterious as the last several decades of the life of Jean Sibelius,". Title "Mature period from 1910–1920", oh deary me. Dangerous statements such as "would eventually compare with the two other great musical innovators at the time (Schoenberg and Stravinsky)". And get rid of this conditional as future. "14¾ in (37.5 cm) "—MOS breach. Stubby, disjointed paragraphs. Tony 12:46, 17 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Remove per Tony's concerns. LuciferMorgan 21:04, 23 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strong retain if nothing more serious than the present objections can be presented.
    • Myke Cuthbert's suggestions would improve the article; although I note that Dmitri Shostakovich has been brought here for precisely the sort of comments from Grove that he advocates for this article.
    • "American Original" is both obvious and widely citeable (it was the subtitle of an essay in Hi-fi Review, September 1964. p. 42) Burkholder's introduction to Charles Ives and his World (p, xi) objects to the use of the phrase to mean that Ives owed nothing to Europe, but attests that even the exaggeration is widespread.
    • Ives' stopping composition in 1927 is citeable to almost any biographical source; the comparison to the almost simultaneous silence of Sibelius may be trite, but is certainly not unsourceable.
    • And I have, after consulting MOS, no idea what Tony's problem with "14¾ in (37.5 cm)" may be. In any case, like most complaints about so-called MOS breaches, it is far too trivial to be actionable. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 05:17, 25 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Over time, Ives would come to be regarded as one of the "American Originals""—So ... when? During what period was this reputation formed, and where is it attested?
  • The lead is still hopelessly inadequate. At the very least, we need a better description of his musical style than "uniquely American idiom"; emphasising his experimental techniques gives completely the wrong balance in this context. He might have been remarkably original, but his style must have been based on something pre-existing. What? And can we be let into the secret of what genres his output spans, in summary?
  • "unusual phrasing and orchestration, and even a blatantly dissonant 11 note chord ending the work"—Unusual in relation to what? It's so vague. And whose opinion is this (citation please)? Hyphen missing.
    • Unusual with regard to the music of his time, or indeed now. (I've never heard of an Ives pastiche, for example; but Copland and Stravinsky are common.
  • Towards the end it collapses into disjointed stubbiness.
  • "it is often difficult to put exact dates on his compositions"—Sometimes it's difficult, sometimes easy?
  • For such as major figure, and one Americans would be keen to study as a national icon, it's hard to believe that the reference list is so small and lacking in recent items. And it's hard to believe that there haven't been valuable doctoral studies. These need to be referred to, and their information integrated into the article, particularly WRT style, which is treated in vague terms and without placing him in music history properly.

It's a pity: this could be saved, but I haven't got time to do it (has PManderson?). Tony (talk) 11:03, 30 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

    • It doesn't need to be saved, and it's not my field, but I'll see what I can do. That embarassment on the Flavian Amphitheatre will probably be first, though. Septentrionalis PMAnderson
  • Remove, 1a prose problems already mentioned, stubbiness in Reception, and weasly unattributed statements throughout, example: One of the variations is in the style of a polonaise while the interludes, possibly added some years after the piece had originally been composed, are probably Ives' first use of bitonality. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:15, 2 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    • A fascinating example. That is a well-advised hedge. If, as Swafford thinks, the piece as printed in 1949 is what Ives wrote in 1891, it is not only the first use in Ives, but the first systematic use in the world (op. cit., p. 63). But the identity is not certain; and Ives himself has other sketches, which may be earlier, which use bitonality. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:33, 2 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I've dealt with those two, which were easy to find. Anything else, preferably substantive? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 00:10, 3 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This is all that has been done since Sandy's review. Tony (talk) 14:01, 11 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Closing: Nothing happening. Marskell 19:33, 13 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article review. No further edits should be made to this page.
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