Charles Edward Ives (October 20, 1874 – May 19, 1954) was an
American
modernist composer. He is widely regarded as one of the first
American composers of international significance. Ives' music was
largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went
unperformed for many years. Over time, Ives came to be regarded as
an "American Original". Ives combined the American popular and
church-music traditions of his youth with European art music, and
was among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of
experimental music, with
musical techniques including
polytonality,
polyrhythm,
tone
clusters,
aleatoric elements,
and
quarter tones, thus foreshadowing
virtually every major musical innovation of the 20th
century.Sources of Charles Ives’s tonal imagery are
hymn tunes and
traditional songs, the town band at
holiday parade, the fiddlers at Saturday night dances, patriotic
songs, sentimental parlor ballads, and the melodies of
Stephen Foster.
Biography

Charles Ives,
ca. 1889
Charles
Ives was born in Danbury
, Connecticut
, the son of George Ives, a U.S. Army bandleader in the
American Civil War, and his wife Mary
Parmelee. A strong influence of Charles's may have been sitting in
the Danbury town square, listening to his father's marching band
and other bands on other sides of the square
simultaneously. George Ives's unique
music lessons were also a strong influence on Charles; George Ives
took an open-minded approach to
musical
theory, encouraging his son to experiment in bitonal and
polytonal harmonizations. It was from his father that Charles Ives
also learned the music of
Stephen
Foster. Ives became a church organist at the age of 14 and
wrote various hymns and songs for church services, including his
Variations on 'America' .
Ives moved to New
Haven
in 1893, enrolling in the Hopkins School
where he captained the baseball team.
In
September 1894, Ives entered Yale University
, studying under Horatio
Parker. Here he composed in a choral style similar to
his mentor, writing church music and even an 1896 campaign song for
William McKinley. On November 4,
1894 Charles's father died, a crushing blow to the young composer,
but to a large degree Ives continued the musical experimentation he
had begun with George Ives.
At Yale College Ives was a prominent figure; he was a member of
HeBoule,
Delta Kappa Epsilon
(Phi chapter) and
Wolf's
Head Society, and sat as chairman of the
Ivy Committee. He enjoyed sports at Yale and
played on the varsity football team. Michael C. Murphy, his coach,
once remarked that it was a crying shame that Charles Ives spent so
much time at music as otherwise he could have been a champion
sprinter. His works
Calcium Light Night and
Yale-Princeton Football Game show the influence of college
and sports on Ives' composition. He wrote his
Symphony No.
1 as his senior thesis under Parker's supervision.
He continued his work as a church organist until May 1902. In 1899
he moved to employment with the insurance agency Charles H. Raymond
& Co., where he stayed until 1906. In 1907, upon the failure of
Raymond & Co., he and his friend
Julian Myrick formed their own
insurance agency Ives & Co., which later
became Ives & Myrick, where he remained until he retired.
During his career as an insurance executive, Ives devised creative
ways to structure life-insurance packages for people of means,
which laid the foundation of the modern practice of
estate planning . His
Life Insurance
with Relation to Inheritance Tax, published in 1918, was
well-received. As a result of this he achieved considerable fame in
the insurance industry of his time, with many of his business peers
surprised to learn that he was also a composer.
In his spare time he
composed music and, until his marriage, worked as an organist in
Danbury and New Haven
as well as Bloomfield
, New
Jersey
and New York City. In 1907, Ives suffered
the first of several "heart attacks" (as he and his family called
them) that he had through out his lifetime. These attacks may have
been psychological in origin rather than physical. Following his
recovery from the 1907 attack, Ives entered into one of the most
creative periods of his life as a composer.After marrying Harmony
Twitchell in 1908, they moved into their own apartment in New York.
He had a remarkably successful career in insurance, and continued
to be a prolific composer until he suffered another of several
heart attacks in 1918, after which he composed very little, writing
his very last piece, the song
Sunrise, in August 1926. In
1922, Ives published his
114 Songs which represents the
breadth of his work as a composer — it includes art songs, songs he
wrote as a teenager and young man, and highly dissonant songs such
as "The Majority."According to his wife, one day in early 1927 he
came downstairs with tears in his eyes: he could compose no more,
he said, "nothing sounds right." There have been numerous theories
advanced to explain the silence of his late years, which seems as
mysterious as the last several decades of the life of
Jean Sibelius, who also stopped composing at
almost the same time. While Ives had stopped composing, and was
increasingly plagued by health problems, he did continue to revise
and refine his earlier work, as well as oversee premieres of his
music. After continuing health problems, including diabetes, in
1930 he retired from his insurance business, which gave him more
time to devote to his musical work, but he was unable to write any
new music. During the 1940s he revised his
Concord Sonata, publishing it in 1947
(an earlier version of the sonata and the accompanying prose
volume,
Essays Before a Sonata were privately printed in
1920).Ives died in 1954 in New York City.
Ives's early music (before 1900)
Ives was formally trained in music at Yale. His First Symphony
shows a grasp of the academic skills needed to write in the
traditional
sonata form of the late 19th
century, as well as a tendency to display an individual and
iconoclastic harmonic style. His father was a band leader, and like
Hector Berlioz, Ives was fascinated
with both outdoor music and instrumentation. His attempts to fuse
these interests coupled with his devotion to Beethoven set the
direction for the remainder of his musical life.
Ives published a large collection of his songs, many of which had
piano parts which paralleled modern movements in Europe, including
bitonality and
pantonality. He was an accomplished pianist,
capable of improvising in a variety of styles, including those
which were then quite new. Although he is now best known for his
orchestral music, he composed two string quartets and other works
of
chamber music. His work as an
organist led him to write
Variations on "America" in 1891,
which he premiered at a recital celebrating the
Fourth of July.
The piece takes the
tune
(which is the same one as is used for the
national anthem of the United Kingdom)
through a series of fairly standard but witty variations; it was
not published until 1949. The variations differ sharply: a running
line, a set of close harmonies, a march, a
polonaise, and a ragtime allegro; the interludes
are one of the first uses of
bitonality;
William Schuman arranged this for
orchestra in 1964 and again for symphonic band in 1968.
Middle period (1900-1910)
Around the turn of twentieth century Ives composed his
Symphony No. 2, signifying a departure from the
conservative approach of his composition teacher at Yale, Horatio
Parker. His first symphony is a more conventional piece since
Parker had insisted that he stick to the older European style.
However, the second symphony, composed after he had graduated,
adopted new techniques that included musical quotes, unusual
phrasing and orchestration, and even a blatantly dissonant 11 note
chord ending the work. The second symphony foreshadows his later
compositional style even though the piece is relatively
conservative by Ives' standards.
In 1906 Ives composed what some have argued was the first radical
musical work of the twentieth century, "Central Park in the Dark".
The piece evokes an evening comparing sounds from nearby nightclubs
in Manhattan (playing the popular music of the day, ragtime,
quoting "Hello My Baby" and even Sousa's "
Washington Post March") with the
mysterious dark and misty qualities of the Central Park woods
(played by the strings). The string harmony uses shifting chord
structures that are not solely based on thirds but a combination of
thirds, fourths, and fifths. Near the end of the piece the
remainder of the orchestra builds up to a grand chaos ending on a
dissonant chord, leaving the string section to end the piece save
for a brief violin duo superimposed over the unusual chord
structures.
Ives had composed two symphonies, but it is with
The Unanswered Question (1906),
written for the highly unusual combination of
trumpet, four
flutes, and
string orchestra, that he
established the mature sonic world that became his signature style.
The strings (located offstage) play very slow,
chorale-like music throughout the piece while on
several occasions the trumpet (positioned behind the audience)
plays a short motif that Ives described as "the eternal question of
existence". Each time the trumpet is answered with increasingly
shrill outbursts from the flutes (onstage) — apart from the last:
The Unanswered Question. The
piece is typical Ives — it juxtaposes various disparate elements,
it appears to be driven by a narrative never fully revealed to the
audience, and it is tremendously mysterious. It has become one of
his more popular works.
Leonard
Bernstein borrowed its title for his
Charles Eliot Norton Lectures
in 1973, noting that he always thought of the piece as a musical
question, not a metaphysical one.
Mature period (1910–1923)
Starting around 1910 Ives began composing his most accomplished
works including the "Holidays Symphony" and arguably his best-known
piece "
Three Places in New
England".
Pieces such as
The
Unanswered Question were almost certainly influenced by
the New England
transcendentalist
writers
Ralph Waldo Emerson and
Henry David Thoreau. These were
important influences to Ives, as he acknowledged in his
Piano Sonata No.
2: Concord, Mass.,
1840–60 (1909–15), which he described as an "impression of
the spirit of transcendentalism that is associated in the minds of
many with Concord, Mass., of over a half century ago...undertaken
in impressionistic pictures of Emerson and Thoreau, a sketch of the
Alcotts, and a
scherzo supposed to reflect a lighter quality which
is often found in the fantastic side of
Hawthorne."
The sonata is possibly Ives's best-known piece for solo piano
(although it should be noted that there is an optional part for
flute). (A part for
viola in the "Emerson"
movement is not intended for a viola player — it is simply the
"viola part" from the original
Emerson
Concerto sketch, which was also to be played by bassoon and
tubular bells.) Rhythmically and harmonically, it is typically
adventurous, and it demonstrates Ives' fondness for
quotation — on several occasions the
opening motto from
Beethoven's
Fifth Symphony is quoted.
It also contains one of the most striking examples of Ives'
experimentalism: in the second movement, he instructs the pianist
to use a piece of wood to produce a dense but generally very soft
cluster chord. All these effects are
combined to create one of the towering masterworks of 20th century
piano literature—an unprecedented masterpiece of American
music.
Perhaps the most remarkable piece of orchestral music Ives
completed was his
Fourth
Symphony (1910–16). The list of forces required to perform
the work alone is extraordinary. The work closely mirrors
The
Unanswered Question. There is no shortage of novel effects. (A
tremolando is heard throughout the second
movement. A fight between discordance and traditional tonal music
is heard in the final movement. The piece ends quietly with just
the percussion playing at a distance.) In it Ives finally resolves
all of his compositional issues and the full force of his
considerable genius is heard. The final movement can be seen as an
apotheosis of his work and a culmination of his musical
achievement. A complete performance was not given until 1965,
almost half a century after the symphony was completed, and more
than a decade after Ives's death.
Ives left behind material for an unfinished
Universe Symphony, which he
was unable to assemble in his lifetime despite two decades of work.
This was due to his health problems as well as his shifting
conception of the work. There have been several attempts at
completion or performing version. However, none has found its way
into general performance. The symphony takes the ideas in the
Symphony No. 4 to an even higher level, with complex cross rhythms
and difficult layered dissonance along with unusual instrumental
combinations.
Ives's chamber works include the String Quartet No. 2, where the
parts are often written at extremes of counterpoint, ranging from
spiky dissonance in the movement labeled "Arguments" to
transcendentally slow. This range of extremes is frequent in Ives'
music — crushing blare and dissonance contrasted with lyrical quiet
— and carried out by the relationship of the parts slipping in and
out of phase with each other. Ives's idiom, like
Mahler's, employed highly independent melodic
lines. It is regarded as difficult to play because many of the
typical signposts for performers are not present. This work had a
clear influence on
Elliott Carter's
Second String Quartet, which is similarly a four-way theatrical
conversation.
Reception
Ives's music was largely ignored during his lifetime as an active
composer, but since then his reputation has greatly increased.
Juilliard
commemorated the 50th anniversary of Ives' death by
performing his music over six days in 2004. Many of his
works went unperformed for many years. His tendency to experiment
and his increasing use of dissonance were not well taken by the
musical establishment of the time. The difficulties in performing
the rhythmic complexities in his major orchestral works made them
daunting challenges even decades after they were composed.
One of the more damning words one could use to describe music in
Ives's view was "nice", and his famous remark "use your ears like
men!" seemed to indicate that he did not care about his reception.
On the contrary, Ives was interested in popular reception, but on
his own terms.
Early supporters of his music included
Henry Cowell,
Elliott
Carter and
Aaron Copland. Cowell's
periodical
New Music published a substantial number of
Ives's scores (with the composer's approval), but for almost 40
years Ives had few performances that he did not arrange or back,
generally with
Nicolas Slonimsky
as the conductor. After seeing a copy of Ives' self-published 114
Songs during the 1930s, Copland published a newspaper article
praising the collection.
Ives began to acquire more public recognition during the 1930s,
with performances of a chamber orchestra version of his
Three
Places in New England both in the U.S. and on tour in Europe
by conductor Nicholas Slonimsky and the New York Town Hall premiere
of his Piano Sonata No. 2 (the
Concord Sonata) by John
Kirkpatrick in 1939, which led to favorable commentary in the major
New York newspapers. Later, around the time of the composer's death
in 1954, Kirkpatrick teamed with soprano Helen Boatwright for the
first extended recorded recital of Ives' songs for the obscure
Overtone label (Overtone Records catalog number 7). (Boatwright and
Kirkpatrick recorded a new selection of songs for the Ives
Centennial Collection that Columbia Records published in
1974.)
His obscurity lifted a little in the 1940s, when he met
Lou Harrison, a fan of his music who began to
edit and promote it. Most notably Harrison conducted the premiere
of the
Symphony No. 3 (1904) in 1946. The next
year, this piece won Ives the
Pulitzer Prize for Music. Ives gave
the prize money away (half of it to Harrison), saying "prizes are
for boys, and I'm all grown up".
At this time, Ives was also promoted by
Bernard Herrmann, who worked as a conductor
at CBS and in 1940 became principal conductor of the CBS Symphony
Orchestra. While there he was a champion of Charles Ives's music.
When meeting Ives, Hermann confessed that he had tried his hand at
performing the
Concord Sonata.
Remarkably, Ives, who actually avoided the radio and the
phonograph, agreed to make a series of piano recordings from 1933
to 1943 that were later issued by
Columbia Records on a special LP set issued
for Ives's centenary in 1974.
New
World Records issued 42 tracks of Ives's recordings on CD on
April 1, 2006.
Recognition of Ives's music has improved. He received praise from
Arnold Schoenberg, who regarded
him as a monument to artistic integrity, and from the New York
School of
William Schuman. He won
the admiration of
Gustav Mahler, who
said that Ives was a true musical revolutionary. Mahler talked of
premiering Ives's Third Symphony with the
New York Philharmonic, but Mahler's
death soon after prevented the premiere.
In 1951,
Leonard Bernstein
conducted the world premiere of Ives's Second Symphony in a
broadcast concert by the
New York
Philharmonic; the Iveses heard the performance on their cook's
radio and were amazed at the audience's warm reception to the
music. Bernstein continued to conduct Ives's music and made a
number of recordings with the Philharmonic for
Columbia Records; he even honored Ives on
one of his televised youth concerts and in a special disc included
with the reissue of the 1960 recording of the second symphony and
the
Fourth of July movement from Ives'
Holidays
symphony.
Another pioneering Ives recording, undertaken during the 1950s, was
the first complete set of the four violin sonatas, performed by
Cleveland Orchestra concertmaster Rafael Druian and John
Simms.
Leopold Stokowski took on the
Symphony No. 4 in 1965, regarding the work as "the heart of the
Ives problem"; the Carnegie Hall world premiere by the
American Symphony Orchestra led
to the first recording of the music.
Another promotor of Ives was choral conductor Gregg Smith, who made
a series of recordings of the composer's shorter works during the
1960s, including first stereo recordings of the psalm settings and
arrangements of many short pieces for theater orchestra. The
Juilliard String Quartet recorded the two string quartets during
the 1960s.
In the present,
Michael Tilson
Thomas is an enthusiastic exponent of Ives' symphonies, as is
composer and biographer
Jan Swafford.
Ives's work is regularly programmed in Europe. Ives has also
inspired pictorial artists, most notably
Eduardo Paolozzi, who entitled one of his
1970s sets of
prints Calcium Light
Night, each print being named for an Ives piece (including
Central Park in the Dark).
In 1991, Connecticut
's legislature designated Ives as that state's
official composer.
The
Scottish baritone Henry Herford
began a survey of Ives's songs in 1990, but this remains
incomplete, owing to the collapse of the record company involved
(
Unicorn-Kanchana).
Pianist-composer and Wesleyan
University
professor Neely Bruce has made a life's study of
Ives. To date, he has staged seven parts of a concert series
devoted to the complete songs of Ives.
Musicologist David Gray Porter [AKA D. G. Porter] reconstructed a
piano concerto, the "
Emerson
Concerto", from Ives's sketches. A recording of the work was
released by
Naxos Records.
However, Ives is not without his critics. Some find his music
bombastic and pompous. Others find it, strangely enough, timid in
that the fundamental sound of European traditional music is still
present in his works. His onetime supporter Elliott Carter has
called his work incomplete, but has since revised his stance.
Influence on twentieth-century music
A bold testament to Ives's greatness comes from no less an
authority than
Arnold
Schönberg himself. Arnold's widow eventually found a note of
his in the form of a brief poem shortly after his death (just three
years before Ives himself died). The note was originally written in
1944 when Schoenberg was living in Los Angeles and teaching at UCLA
stating....
There is a great man living in this country – a composer.
He has solved the problem how to preserve one's self and to
learn. He responds to negligence by contempt. He
is not forced to accept praise or blame. His name is
Ives.
Ives was also a great financial supporter of twentieth century
music, often supporting works that were written by other composers.
This he did in secret, telling his beneficiaries it was really his
wife who wanted him to do so.
Nicolas
Slonimsky said in 1971, "He financed my entire career."
List of selected works
Note: Because Ives often made several different versions of the
same piece, and because his work was generally ignored during his
lifetime, it is often difficult to put exact dates on his
compositions. The dates given here are sometimes best
guesses. There have even been speculations that Ives
purposely misdated his own pieces earlier or later than actually
written, but these have been largely debunked by Ives scholars such
as Jan Swafford.
- Variations on America for organ (1891)
- The Circus Band (a march describing the Circus coming to
town)
- Psalm settings (14, 42, 54, 67, 90, 135, 150) (1890s)
- String Quartet No.
1, From the
Salvation Army (1897–1900)
- Symphony No.
1 in D minor
(1898–1901)
- Symphony No. 2 (Ives gave dates of 1899-1902;
analysis of handwriting and manuscript paper suggests
1907-1909)
- Symphony No. 3, The Camp Meeting
(1908–10)
- Central Park in the Dark for chamber orchestra (1906,
1909)
- The Unanswered
Question for chamber group (1906; rev. 1934)
- Piano Sonata No. 1 (1909–16)
- Piano Trio (c1909–10, rev.
c1914–15)
- Violin Sonata No. 1 (1910–14; rev. ca. 1924)
- Violin Sonata No. 4, Children's Day at the Camp
Meeting (1911–16)
- A Symphony: New
England Holidays (1904–1913)
- "Robert Browning" Overture (1911–14)
- Symphony No. 4 (1912–18; rev. 1924–26)
- String Quartet No. 2 (1913–15)
- Pieces for chamber ensemble grouped as "Sets," some called
Cartoons or Take-Offs or Songs Without Voices
(1906–18); includes Calcium
Light Night
- Three Places in New
England (Orchestral Set No. 1) (1910–14; rev. 1929)
- Violin Sonata No. 2 (1914–17)
- Violin Sonata No. 3 (1914–17)
- Orchestral Set No. 2 (1915–19)
- Piano Sonata No.
2, Concord, Mass.,
1840–60 (1916–19) (revised many times by Ives)
- Universe symphony
(incomplete, 1915–28, worked on symphony until his death in
1954)
- 114 Songs (composed various years 1887–1921, published
1922.)
- Three Quarter Tone Piano Pieces (1923–24)
- Orchestral Set No. 3 (incomplete, 1919–26, notes added after
1934)
See also
Notes
Further reading
External links