Charles Ives

I

Introduction

Charles Ives (1874-1954), American composer, whose technical innovations and freedom of imagination anticipated much 20th-century music and inspired younger musicians.

Ives was born on October 20, 1874, in Danbury, Connecticut. He received his most significant musical education from his father, George E. Ives, an American Civil War bandmaster and highly original musical thinker. As a youth Ives played the drum in his father's town band and, as organist in a local church, he wrote his first organ and choral compositions. At Yale University he studied with the eminent American composer Horatio Parker, who was perplexed by his student's musical unconventionality. Ives's college years began with a severe personal blow—his father's death in 1894.

II

Career

After graduating from Yale in 1898 Ives worked in New York as an insurance clerk and church organist. In 1906 he founded his own insurance company, known after 1909 as Ives & Myrick; his innovations in the insurance field, which continued until his retirement in 1930, included the practice of estate planning.

Realizing that his music was too unconventional to provide a living, he composed primarily for his own pleasure and, except for works for organ and church choirs, most of his compositions remained unperformed for years.

In 1908 Ives married Harmony Twitchell, who was a powerful support to him in his double life as insurance executive and composer; however the physical strain of it led to a breakdown in 1918, and he wrote very little new music after 1921. In the following decades interest in Ives's music grew, especially through the advocacy of other composers such as Cowell, Copland, and performers like Bernstein and Stokowski, and many of his works received long-delayed first performances. Ives died on May 19, 1954, in New York.

III

Music

Ives's music is rich in Americana. He quotes, distorts, combines, and disguises familiar church and revival hymns, marches, Civil War songs, and other tunes—sometimes for their evocative power, sometimes as a tool for musical structure, but never degenerating into mere local colour, appreciable only by those familiar with the quoted tunes. His experiments in polytonality (simultaneous use of two or more keys) include the earliest-known polytonal piece, Variations on “America” for organ (1888). Much of the dissonance in his music is not isolated but structural, stemming from the clash of keys or even of large blocks of sound, as in the approach of two parade bands in Three Places in New England (1903-1914, first performed in 1931). Often his music is polyrhythmic and polymetric (using conflicting rhythms and time signatures).

Several different strains of musical and aesthetic thought can be seen in his work. Delight in experimenting with sound can be seen in such works as the Three Quarter-Tone Pieces, for two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart, or From the Steeples and the Mountains, for trumpet, trombone and four sets of bells (all playing in different keys), which gives a visionary image of an ecstatic peal of church bells. Fantasias on hymn tunes and popular songs with deep emotional resonances for Ives can be heard in the four violin sonatas (1902-1915) and the 1st piano sonata (1909), leavened with bitonal ragtime and mystical, Impressionistic interludes. In orchestral works such as The Fourth of July (1911, from the Holidays Symphony) or the second movement of the 4th symphony (1916), this collage of sources is heard on an epic scale, the quotations building up into a textural density unequalled before or since.

The entire range of Ives' stylistic language is contained in his more than 140 songs, written throughout his career. Their huge variety of techniques and moods range from polished imitations of German lieder such as “Feldeinsamkeit” to improvisational declamation in “Charlie Rutlage” and rugged experimentation anticipating the twelve-tone system in “Soliloquy”.

For Ives the very eclecticism of his musical sources was itself a philosophical statement, derived in part from Transcendentalism, a school of thought associated with mid-19th century New England. This is given clearest expression in the 2nd piano sonata (1915; subtitled Concord, Massachusetts, 1840-1860, commonly referred to as the Concord Sonata) which gives musical pictures of four writers and thinkers of that time: Emerson, Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott, and Thoreau. The musical idiom is by turns grandiose and intimate, the four movements forming together a vast rhapsody on a single long melody that is heard in snatches throughout before being stated completely only once, at the end of the work, by an off-stage flute.

In Ives' best work, such as the Concord Sonata, the 2nd string quartet (1913) or the 4th symphony, the diverse musical styles and aesthetic aims come together in a grand synthesis, coalescing into a unified artistic statement that is astonishing in view of their disparate origins.

Among his other works are a dozen psalm settings for chorus and organ; two orchestral sets (Three Places in New England is the first); several short works for chamber orchestra (including The Unanswered Question); and several short piano works, including more than 20 studies. His prose writings include Essays Before a Sonata (1920), a set of essays on the Transcendentalists published to accompany the Concord Sonata.