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.

Charles Edward Ives was born 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 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 City 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 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.

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In 1908 Ives married Harmony Twitchell, who was a powerful support to him in his double life as insurance executive and composer. After ill health forced him to retire in 1930, he wrote no more music. In the following decades interest in Ives's music grew and many of his works received long-delayed first performances. Ives died May 19, 1954, in New York City.

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. 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 stems 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 (1903-14, first performed in 1931). Often his music is polyrhythmic and polymetric (using conflicting rhythms and time signatures).

Among Ives's works are four symphonies; Holidays (four sketches for orchestra, 1904-13); Three Quarter-Tone Pieces (1923-1924) and the monumental Second Piano Sonata (subtitled Concord, Massachusetts, 1840-1860; (1909-1915), both for piano; string quartets; violin sonatas; and 114 Songs (1921). His writings include Essays Before a Sonata (1920; reprinted 1970 as Essays Before a Sonata, the Majority, and Other Writings).

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