A Song – For Anything (1892) was classed by Ives as a ‘Sentimental Ballad’; he claimed it was an illustration ‘of how inferior music is inclined to follow inferior words’ and vice versa. Its three verses are in fact three different texts – one a sentimental love poem, one a student apostrophe to Yale, and earliest of all (and best, according to Ives) a religious homily, originally sung in church as a kind of hymn.
from notes by Calum MacDonald © 2005
