Charles Ives is the irreplaceable maverick of American music, writing everything from sentimental Victorian songs to the wildest pandemonium, but he was a maverick more by default than intention. The boggling spectrum of styles and techniques he wielded in his music, itself a mirror of his country’s prodigal diversity, did not evolve quickly or capriciously. Ives was a teenaged organ prodigy when he began composing in familiar forms and genres: songs for the parlor, band marches, polite pieces for local musicians and singers. At the same time, his bandmaster father, George Ives, bequeathed his son an inquiring and adventurous spirit regarding the materials of music. Any combination of notes at all was acceptable, his father said, if you knew what you were doing with them. That was surely the first time a budding composer had ever been handed that kind of freedom, and Ives knew what to do with it. So, while the young Ives was writing conventional music for immediate use, he was privately experimenting with music in two keys at once, free harmonies, conventional chords stacked up together, and other unprecedented techniques.
Charles Edward Ives was born in the hat-making town of Danbury, Connecticut. He studied piano and organ intensively in his youth and took his first professional church-organ job at age fourteen. In 1898 he graduated from Yale, where he studied with the leading American composition teacher of the day, German-trained Horatio Parker. Parker brushed aside Ives’s musical experiments, but he taught his student a great deal about the shaping of large works. At the same time, in college Ives played ragtime piano at parties and local theaters, and at the keyboard amused his friends with what he called “take-offs” of football games (he was a lifelong sports fan), fraternity initiations, and the like. From college on, most of his work was program music picturing a story or an event. Vivacious, funny, unpredictable, “Dasher” Ives was a popular man on the Yale campus.
After college, facing the reality that the music he wanted to write would not earn him a living, Ives got a job in the life insurance industry in Manhattan. He turned out to be good at that, too. In the next decades he rose to the top of the profession, a founding partner in the largest insurance agency in the country. At the same time he composed at white heat nights and weekends and vacations. He was likely in some degree manic-depressive, but more the former than the latter.
Ives absorbed and responded intensely to everything he heard. To him, all music was an avatar of the eternal human spirit that lies beneath it. Every kind of music excited him if it was earnest and authentic, whether it was a Bach fugue, a Brahms symphony, a gospel hymn, a barroom ragtime, a town band on the march. Much of his music would involve quotes of familiar American tunes—hymns, marches, patriotic songs: music of the people. He had a particular love for the enthusiasms and quirks of amateur musicians, who played for love rather than money, and he translated even their mistakes into his music. “Bandstuff,” he told one of his long-suffering copyists. “They didn’t always play right & together and it was as good either way.” As he matured as a composer he found continually new ways to interweave the myriad conventional and radical voices he had at his command—a larger range of style and technique than any composer had ever wielded before. “Style,” he wrote, “has been too narrowly conceived of.”
In practice, the young Ives had a traditional side grounded in his formal training, on which he based his early large works such as the European-style First Symphony, and the exploratory side that for years was expressed in small experimental pieces. Here is an example of each. Starting in his teens he drafted a series of experimental choral psalm settings, each a study of a particular technique. First came the precocious little Psalm 67. It is nominally in two keys, G minor in the men and C major in the women, but in practice it is a prophetic essay in what the future called polychords, meaning juxtapositions of common harmonies. The effect is a strange, lush, sui generis wash of sound.
Symphony No. 2, finished around 1902, is in form and harmony comparatively well behaved. It begins with a dark-toned fugue and goes on to movements in more or less standard layouts. But there are two quite special things about it. First, now and then it bursts into a literal quote of European music, mainly bits of Brahms, Bach, and Tchaikovsky, as if a window were briefly opened into the past. Ives used musical quotes for his whole career, but rarely so baldly as in the Second. Here the quotes stand as a symbol of his intention to join the European symphonic tradition with the voice of the American people. That is the other thing about the Second, it is the first large concert work in history with a distinctly American voice. That is one of Ives’s historic achievements that went unnoticed for a long time. The Second would have to wait nearly fifty years for its premiere by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. It’s a lovely and ebullient piece, full of echoes of Stephen Foster, with a finale like a grand fiddle tune.
As he rose in the life insurance industry around the turn of the century, Ives also held important posts as a church organist and choir director, writing proper Victorian-style pieces for services. By 1902 he’d had enough of musical convention and felt driven to explore his most far-reaching ideas. He quit his last church position and became, for two decades, a virtual private composer. In that period, essentially every professional musician to whom he showed his more advanced music told him he was crazy. It takes phenomenal courage to carry on in a situation like that. Only when European modernist music arrived on American shores in the 1920s did listeners begin to have some context for his sounds. But Ives had wielded modernist techniques from tone clusters to atonality long before anyone else, and with no knowledge of or connection to modernism. The most accurate historical category for Ives is “Ivesian.”
One of the first fruits of his new freedom was The Unanswered Question, drafted in 1906 and put into final form decades later. Here Ives first applied collage technique to music. It has three layers, roughly coordinated. A haunting background of strings represent the “Silence of the Druids.” Over that a trumpet repeatedly intones the “Perennial Question of Existence.” With increasing fury, a group of winds attempts to answer the trumpet’s question. Finally the trumpet asks the question one last time, answered by an eloquent silence. For Ives, a question was better than an answer. A question, he said, got you further and higher than stopping at certainty and building barricades.
It was after his 1908 marriage to Harmony Twichell, daughter of a prominent Hartford minister, that Ives reached his maturity, when he began to apply his most advanced ideas to big, ambitious works. He wrote, “One thing I am certain of is that, if I have done anything good in music, it was, first, because of my father, and second, because of my wife.” To Harmony, Charlie and his music were the same, so she loved them both. Intensely religious people (Harmony more conventionally so than her husband), they developed a kind of theology around his music: their love was a particle of divine love, and his music would be their way of spreading that love into the world.
Which is to say that Ives is fundamentally a religious composer, however madcap he can be sometimes. He also believed that there was not enough laughter in the concert hall, a situation he intended to remedy. An example is his hilarious Four Ragtime Dances from around 1902, in which the popular style is vandalized and scandalized in an almost cubistic way, all of it covertly based on gospel hymns (try Ragtime No. 4 first). Ives’s intention in these pieces was not to sully the sacred with dance tunes but rather to declare that each in its way is holy. By then African American ragtime had become a vital part of his voice.
Here are three works from Ives’s maturity that show his range, his vigor, his revolutionary technique, no less his grounding in tradition, his wit, his spirituality (sometimes all those things on the same tumultuous page). Three Places in New England is one of the works he called a “set,” meaning a collection of semi-independent pieces joined by a programmatic idea. The dreamlike first movement, “The St. Gaudens on Boston Common,” is his response to the famous sculpture depicting the first black regiment of the Civil War. The movement is a joining of slow march and a sort of proto-blues. Next, “Putnam’s Camp” is a wildly comic evocation of that Revolutionary-era campground near Danbury; in it Ives fondly conjures the image of amateur bands falling off the beat and playing wrong notes with gusto. Last, “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” was based on a trip he and Harmony took to that village in autumn, shortly after their marriage. Walking along the river, they heard a hymn from a distant church. In a magical stretch of tone-painting, Ives’s Housatonic conjures the flowing river and the autumnal colors; over them floats a lovely hymnlike tune. The movement reaches a whirling, ecstatic climax that is a rapturous vision of love human and divine.
The symphony Holidays is a larger set, its theme four American holidays that also evoke the four seasons. First is “George Washington’s Birthday,” starting with an evocation of bleak winter in complex murmuring string textures, the second part a rollicking barn dance to warm things up. “Decoration Day” (today’s Veterans Day) begins with an image of dawn in quiet string harmonies, then moves to a poignant slow march recalling townspeople walking in solemn procession to the cemetery; there amid a haze of strings we hear “Taps” intoned over the graves of the Civil War dead. Then comes a boisterous march back to town—but when Ives writes a march it’s more than a march, it’s the whole parade, with cheers and multiple bands going by. “The Fourth of July” is the most riotous of the Holidays. Ives recalled his hometown’s Fourth as a spectacle of bands, fire engine bells, drunken bandsmen and spectators, and the grand finale of fireworks. All that is in the music, finishing with a full-orchestra explosion. The richly sonorous “Thanksgiving” finale is based on organ pieces written in his twenties, his church-organist days, when Ives was already using sophisticated polytonality. In music rich with folk tunes and autumnal colors, the movement builds to an exalted choral conclusion.
If you’ve absorbed the above, maybe you’re ready to take on Ives’s most challenging, deepest, greatest work: the Fourth Symphony, finished around 1924. It is one of the most ambitious, innovative, uproarious, concrete, at the same time spiritual works of the century. In the first movement, with its craggy and searching opening followed by a flowing hymn, the chorus introduces a “Traveler,” which is to say a pilgrim, and the transcendent “glory-beaming star” he seeks. The ensuing journey is life from high to low, comic to prophetic. The grand pandemonium of the second movement Ives called the “Comedy.” It is his version of the old symphonic scherzo, in part a portrait of modern urban life. For Ives that meant turn-of-the-century Manhattan; he called the city “Hell Hole,” but he also retained an irrepressible fondness for its teeming vitality.
A traditional fugue in C major, the spacious third movement is set in a New England church, but that formal and doctrinal stop in the symphony’s pilgrimage is not its conclusion. When it arrives, the mystical finale is a luminous fabric of whispering, finally jubilant voices, at the coda resolving into the hymn that has been singing beneath the symphony’s surface all along: “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” That is where Ives wanted to bring his listeners. The Fourth Symphony is Ives’s most far-reaching exploration of his vision of life and music, in a work of universal religion. At the end the music seems to evanesce into the stars, still searching.
Ives wrote, “The fabric of existence weaves itself whole. You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.” We can sense his larger point and method in, of all places, the “Comedy” movement of the Fourth Symphony. Amid its masses of sound tumbling and crashing in air, the sharp-eared can discern something remarkable: all these teeming, shouting, drunken and riotous voices are somehow moving together. That is what Ives was getting at. Each of us on our own path, with myriad stumbles and detours, traces the transcendent purposes of the divine, and all of us are headed in the same direction.
Ives suffered a debilitating heart attack in 1918. Over the next decade his composing drifted to a halt. In his last twenty-five years he was essentially an invalid, afflicted with severe diabetes. He still played piano, tinkered with his scores, saw to his expanding reputation as best he could, and used his fortune not only for his own music but in support of new music around the country. In his ailing age he remained as gloriously eccentric as ever. From beginning to end Ives was a kind of ongoing, one-man Event. He died in May 1954, his music still being discovered, the Fourth Symphony years from its triumphant first performance by Leopold Stokowski and the American Symphony Orchestra.
More Ives: String Quartet No. 1; Orchestral Set No. 2; collections of songs including “General William Booth Enters into Heaven.”