Charles Ives wrote almost two hundred songs. Although his reputation rests on orchestral, chamber and piano music, it is Ives's songs that represent the heart of his creative thinking.

The expressive variety encountered is accordingly vast: indeed, the gradual evolution of Ives’s songwriting is analogous to the wider evolution of American music during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This new edition includes all the songs that Ives completed. The alphabetic approach ensures that each volume (of which this disc is the first of six) contains a representative cross-section.