Kyle Gann is one of the foremost experts on American music today, having spent almost two decades as the new-music critic for the Village Voice, teaching music theory, history, and competition at New York’s Bard College since 1997, and composing more than 100 of his own works.

He draws from his latest book — which Gann terms “the greatest achievement of my life” — in a discussion of Charles Ives’ masterful Concord Sonata. First published in 1919 and revised by Ives in 1947, the innovative piece is a musical portrait of four renowned, transcendentalist authors who lived in Concord, Massachusetts, in the 19th century: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott (and her father Amos Bronson Alcott), and Henry David Thoreau.