General William Booth Enters into Heaven, composed by the American composer Charles Ives in 1914, represents a competent example of developing the poem of Vachel Lindsay with the possibilities of musical expression. The composition draws an integral picture of Ives through its approach to text-music relation, use of quotation, additive form (cumulative setting) and aspect of realism. The text which Ives handles contains a quotation, progresses formally with a cumulative setting and exhibits a progression of events belonging to a subjective experience/reality with all its complexity and plurality. It’s seen that the composer acts meticulously taking care of the content-form harmony while transporting these data to the musical platform. In case of the relationship between quotation and form, a harmony and cooperation attracts the attention regarding both continuity/flow and discontinuity/fragmentedness. “Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb?”, quoted both in the text and the music, takes place in the intersection set of this cooperation, developing and being formed through fragmentedness, distortion, indeterminacy and disorder, overlapping with the realist approach of Ives. In this article, the four titles of text-music, quotation, form and realism are handled in correlation to each other under musical analysis methods. With the aspect of realism as the last title, Ives’ musical expression is discussed in a philosophical perspective and approved that four titles in total establish a strong relation with each other and draw a coherent picture of Ives. The aim of this article is to enlighten the integral poetics of Ives through the analysis of a successful product on text-music relationship.

Charles Ives, text-music relation, quotation, cumulative setting, realism.