Charles Ives

Charles Ives is one of the most baffling composers, stylistically speaking, you’ll ever hear. It is impossible to categorize him, except, perhaps, as a pre-modern "modern." Eclectic, abrasive (or abusive) to the ear, a man who requires you to work when you listen to his music. Yet some of his pieces move me unlike anything else I’ve ever heard. He lived from 1874 until 1954, almost eighty years, and he’s one of the most antithetical of musicians who ever lived.

After listening to a wide selection of his music, it’s obvious he has no predecessors. It’s also apparent that he’s had no true imitators, either. His music is truly experimental, before "experimental" became commonplace. Some have labeled his music grotesque, and I agree, much of it is. He departed from conventional tonal music years before it would be made avant garde by composers like Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. What sums up his philosophy? Well, I don’t know the answer to that, but as for his composing technique Ives essentially combined American melodies and tunes, Americana if you will, and mixed them with what we consider "classical" music (or perhaps "romantic" music by this point – it was the late 19th century) and the result was something extremely discordant and dissonant that somehow worked.

What begat this man and this never-before-heard style of music?

Simple: his father. Charles’ dad, George, was a well-known band master, and like his son a New Englander through-and-through. The boy picked up the cornet, eventually becoming competent enough to play in his father’s band. George saw in Charles a tabula rasa, and implemented a rigorous training program upon his son. Two words and two words only suffice to describe Charles’ early musical training: unorthodox and unconventional. The primary rule was to experiment, to investigate, to see where music could go and only after that see where it had been.

What type of training are we talking here? Well, dad would play a fairly well-known hymn on the piano, say, in the key of E. And he’d have Charles stand and sing the lyrics to the song – but he’d be forced to sing it in the key of F#. They’d do it over and over, familiarizing themselves with the tensions, the unresolved peculiarities that the warring keys brought out, discovering what worked well, what working somewhat well, and what worked less than somewhat well. Then they’d do it in different keys, different intervals.

Charles started to compose. Quite soon, by his fourteenth birthday, George’s band performed his son’s first work, "A Holiday Quick Step."

Yale called when Ives turned twenty. I’m not sure what exactly he studied there, but if he didn’t major in music it was a big part of the program. Charles tried to conform, tried to study all the "classical" methods of composition. His first symphony, rife with European influence decades old, was a bland failure. A few years later, his second symphony, while still containing derivations of Beethoven and Dvorak, also included some passing references to American hymns and songs. Closer, in the right direction, but still not there.

He left the University after four years (I don’t know if he was graduated or not), moved to New York City and sold insurance. And sold, and sold, and sold some more. So much so that he co-founded an insurance firm a few years later, and quickly became financially independent, providing freedom for the remainder of his life.

Intelligent enough to realize that he was ahead of the times, or perhaps completely out of time, Charles knew there was no market for his music. It would never be fashionable, nor commercially viable. So he wrote for the pure enjoyment of it, for the mental exercise, for the creative release. Never with publication or performance as the end. So as he made his millions in downtown New York none of his coworkers knew of the sublime and extraordinary music he was creating every night.

The major productive portion of his life lasted twenty-seven years, from 1901 until 1928. In that period Ives composed his Third and Fourth Symphonies, the Concord Sonata for piano, Three Places in New England, the Holiday Symphony, four violin sonatas, Tone Roads for small orchestra, and a score of smaller orchestral works. His personality during this period, from those that knew and worked with him, was one of openness, completely lacking in pretension. He was always receptive and willing to try new ideas, as a few minutes of listening to any of these pieces will reveal to you.

At the end of this period illness overtook him; by 1930 he decided to retire completely from the insurance racket. He and his family relocated to a farm in Connecticut, and though he suffered from diabetes and heart disease, he lived another twenty-four years.

His music crept into the public consciousness very, very slowly, at first only through limited circulated copies distributed among his closest friends. A smattering of philharmonic performances here and there. Then – the Third Symphony managed to win a Pulitzer Price in 1947. Still, though, the Second was not publicly performed until four years later, and the Fourth not at all until eleven years after his death.

In 1960 his widow donated his manuscripts to Yale where they were methodically catalogued. Thirteen years later the Charles Ives Society was formed with the aim of performances of his works. And thirteen years after that, the two CDs which I have heard (and the one that I purchased) were recorded and pressed.

My personal favorite, the work that made me forget the traffic I was driving in and furiously search for the replay button on my car’s CD player: Thanksgiving and Forefather’s Day, the last movement from A Symphony: New England Holidays. The music quickens, building theme upon theme, mismatched, tense, increasing in volume and density, until choral resolution, though, true to form, not in a straight 4-4 reading but drawn out, over climactic symphonic release –

O God, beneath Thy guiding hand
Our exiled fathers crossed the sea;
And when they trod the wintry strand,
With prayer and psalm they worshipped Thee.