"…ultimately he sought to integrate all of his musical experiences in a highly personal idiom, blending the fresh, sometimes brash, almost innocent qualities of American tunes with the seriousness and high ideals of European Romanticism… Into this structure adapted from European models [he] pours the new wine of American melody. Every theme is adapted from a vernacular melody… these are not quoted verbatim but are reworked… [he] varies the rhythm and phrasing, spices up the harmony, and avoids coming to a close too quickly… Through all these changes, some of the tunes become almost unrecognisable, and indeed [he] does not expect us necessarily to recognise them. We may not know the tune we're hearing, but we can tell whether it's a fiddle tune, hymn, or other type of melody."
The author is one J Peter Burkholder, and he's not talking about Fahey. The quotation is from the sleeve notes to Charles Ives' Symphony No 2 (Deutsche Grammophon, 1990). The parallel is striking. When Burkholder writes "As Ives develops 'Pig Town Fling' into a passage from the finale of Brahms' First Symphony or transform a figure from Bach's Fugue in E Minor from Book 1 of 'The Well Tempered Clavier' into a familiar motif from 'Camptown Races'…we are immediately in the realm of "Stomping Tonight", or "Sunset on Prince George's County" or any of the long "tone poems".
There is a further comparison between Charles Ives (1874-1954), American composer, and John Fahey, American composer. Leonard Bernstein, in another essay from the same sleeve notes cited, calls Ives "a greatly gifted primitive" and goes on: "The trouble with primitives in any art form… is that they come a dime a dozen. Anyone can present himself as a primitive when he might simply be untalented, lazy, commercial-minded, or all three at once." Ives, like Fahey, we may presume, is the kind of primitive Mr Bernstein likes.