Charles Ives

Composer

  • Born: October 20, 1874
  • Birthplace: Danbury, Connecticut
  • Died: May 19, 1954
  • Place of death: New York, New York

American composer

Using experimental techniques that disregarded traditional musical theories, Ives wrote compositions that expressed American experiences and feelings.

Area of achievement Music

Early Life

The most important influence on the life and career of the American composer Charles Ives was his father, George Edward Ives. The elder Ives, himself an extremely talented and innovative musician, was the youngest bandleader in the Union Army during the Civil War, and, after the war, was a tireless experimenter in novel musical forms and techniques in his hometown of Danbury. These experiments would reappear years later in Charles Ives’s own compositions, which involved intentional dissonance, bold new harmonics, and other deliberate violations of musical tradition.

In addition to this experimental tendency, the father gave his son a solid foundation in basic musical theory and a wide knowledge of traditional American musical forms such as church hymns, camp-meeting tunes, and patriotic marches and airs. Ives was an avid and quick student, and by the age of fourteen he was the youngest professional church organist in Connecticut. He had already begun composing, and his earliest extant piece, “Slow March” (c. 1887), uses one of his favorite devices, that of “quotations” from other musical works, especially popular music. By 1894, Ives had finished his first serious work, a setting to the Psalms; this work also relied on quotations and on extensive use of dissonance, polyphony, and contrasting rhythms.

From 1894 to 1898, Ives attended Yale University, where he studied at the newly formed department of music. From his father, Ives had already learned a distaste for the European musical traditions as transplanted to the United States; both men felt them to be weak, effeminate, and unimaginative. Ives’s experiences at Yale confirmed this belief: His professors were either amused or disdainful of his original compositions and required him to “correct” dissonances and resolve harmonics according to standard that is, European musical theory and training. Although Ives spent much time writing music at Yale, he was known mainly for his tune “The Bells of Yale” (1903), a highly traditional work frequently performed by the university’s glee club.

Life’s Work

On graduation, Ives moved to New York, where he lived with a number of Yale men in a tenement known as Poverty Flat. He took a position with the Mutual Insurance Company but continued to compose at night and during weekends. He sometimes showed his works to friends in the building but seldom consorted with professional musicians.

In 1899, Ives and a friend, Julian Myrick, transferred to an insurance agency associated with Mutual. Together they developed new and more effective methods of selling insurance. In working out these techniques, Ives displayed the humanitarian, benevolent side of his personality, a side allied with the Transcendentalist philosophy espoused by such New England thinkers as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In a remarkably short time, Ives and Myrick became quite wealthy because of their success in the insurance business; at one point, their own company had the largest volume of sales in the country.

While becoming a successful businessman, Ives did not neglect his composition although he made little effort to have his more innovative works performed. Some pieces, such as The Celestial Country (1902), were presented at Central Presbyterian Church in New York, where Ives worked as organist; his more daring work, however, remained in his desk, unheard.

These unperformed works advanced along the experimental lines suggested by Ives’s father. Old tunes were quoted, changed, and transmuted as Ives pitched instrument against instrument and tempo against tempo, defying traditional concepts of music. In doing this, he was working entirely on his own, since his self-imposed isolation from professional musicians left him unaware of the work of contemporary composers.

In works such as his Third Symphony (1904), known as “The Camp Meeting” and based largely on traditional organ tunes and popular songs, he was exploring new musical territory. Often in his works, Ives attempted to use musical form to express nonmusical situations or ideas. This was a recurrent and dominant focus of his career; in essence, Ives was a composer of ideas or situations rather than forms. For example, his work All the Way Around and Back (1906) illustrated a baseball play a runner at first base advances to third on a foul ball and then must return to first.

Ives was also a humorist, both in his concepts and in his titles. One of his most famous works, composed in 1906, is entitled “I. A Contemplation of a Serious Matter: Or, The Unanswered Perennial Question. II. A Contemplation of Nothing Serious: Or, Central Park in the Dark In the Good Old Summer Time.” This work demands two separate orchestras performing independently yet simultaneously.

Shortly after his graduation from Yale, Ives had been introduced to Harmony Twichell, the sister of a college friend. After a long courtship, the two were married by Harmony’s father in June, 1908. The couple first lived in Manhattan, but Ives’s uncertain health and aversion to company led them to purchase a farm in the Connecticut countryside near West Redding. The Iveses had no children of their own, but in 1915 they adopted Edith Osborne Ives, a young girl who had first come to West Redding through the Fresh Air Fund, which sponsored country vacations for poor city children.

The years up to 1918 were the productive period of Ives’s career. In 1909, he finished Washington’s Birthday and the First Piano Sonata; the year 1912 saw the creation of the Concord Sonata, which embodied the spirit of New England Transcendentalism, and Fourth of July, a glorious mixture of program music, popular tunes, and nostalgia for a vanished, bucolic America. That same year produced the work for which Ives is perhaps most respected, Three Places in New England (1912). This work is a musical evocation of the Boston Common, of Putnam’s Camp, a Revolutionary War site in Connecticut, and of the Housatonic River at Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In passages of strong yet touching lyric and melodic beauty, Ives created musical landscapes that were distinctly American in both subject and style. With this work and his cumulative Fourth Symphony (1911-1916), Ives succeeded in his life’s ambition of writing vigorous compositions that sprang naturally from the American experience and which were unfettered by the artificial constraints of European tradition.

Ives had been troubled by heart problems as early as 1906, and in 1918 he had a serious attack. There would be other health complications as he aged, diabetes and cataracts chief among them. His creative period ended in 1918; ironically, he was still almost completely unknown as a composer.

In the early 1920’s, Ives put together his thoughts on music in the book Essays Before a Sonata (1920). He also collected much of his own music, compiling a book of 114 songs and the Concord Sonata, which he had privately printed and mailed free to musicians and critics across the country. The innovative, starkly original works evoked bewilderment and derision from many, but a discerning few were captivated. By 1926, musicians such as Henry Cowell and Nicholas Slonimsky were champions of Ives. Cowell printed Ives’s scores in his magazine New Music, while Slonimsky conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Three Places in New England during a 1931 tour of the United States, Havana, and Paris. The following year, Slonimsky presented Ives’s Fourth of July in Paris, Berlin, and Budapest.

Music written decades before was being heard for the first time, and young American composers were intensely excited. Aaron Copland included seven of Ives’s songs in the 1932 Yaddo Festival, held at Saratoga Springs, New York. In 1933, the first Ives broadcast was conducted by Bernard Herrmann, who later wrote the highly original score for the film Citizen Kane (1941). The culmination of this growing recognition came in 1947 when Ives was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his Third Symphony, which he had composed forty-three years before.

Throughout, Ives steadfastly avoided public association with professional musicians, refusing even to attend performances of his own works. He did help finance musical journals and other activities, but this involved his money and not his time or person. For Ives, music remained a supremely important yet never quite revealed preoccupation, and he seemed at once proud and embarrassed to be known as a great American composer.

Since Ives’s death from a stroke in 1954, his musical reputation has continued to advance, and his compositions have become more available to the listening public. This accessibility is largely through recordings, which are nearly essential for adequate presentation of his difficult scores. Improved audio equipment and techniques make it possible for musicians and engineers to capture the complicated, subtle conditions Ives demanded, while stereophonic sound allows the listener to appreciate fully the variations in location of instruments as well as harmonics that Ives employed in his works. The fact that Ives’s music adapts so well to recordings and in fact needs recording for best impact is yet another indication of his originality and genius.

Significance

While having Fourth of July professionally copied, Ives was forced to write the following message on the manuscript: “Mr. Price: Please don’t try to make things nice! All the wrong notes are right. Just copy as I have I want it that way.”

The note is appropriate to Ives’s musical compositions and career. His bold, innovative works displayed techniques and devices that disregarded or openly defied accepted musical conventions. He used dissonance and discordance, even cacophony, to present his images. His works demanded that orchestras disrupt their normal seating arrangements or that the pianist play the instrument with a strip of wood. Because he was not a professional, musicians regarded him as an ignorant eccentric, while the public dismissed him as a wealthy crank.

Still, even from the first, there were those who heard the true notes of originality and power in Ives’s music. His dissonance, for example, was an integral part of his musical structure, and actually served to reinforce the unity of his compositions. He was a master of melody and variations, and a work such as Fourth of July is a musical metamorphosis that takes as its subject all of America and America’s music.

It was as a composer of specifically American music that Ives was most successful and influential. He rejected the European tradition and sought to replace it with a tough, vital, American musical heritage. This heritage he equated with musical experimentation akin to the political experimentation that formed the nation. In forging a new musical idiom for a new world, Ives became a uniquely and unmistakably American composer.

Bibliography

Burkholder, J. Peter. The Ideas Behind the Music. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985. Traces the development of Ives’s unique aesthetics of composition, which is particularly important for his innovative and individual style and his use of musical forms to portray essentially nonmusical items, such as sports or philosophical ideas.

Cowell, Henry, and Sidney Cowell. Charles Ives and His Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955. Written by a friend and associate of Ives, this was the first full-length study to appear and presents a generally well-rounded biography and musical exposition.

Felsenfeld, Daniel. Ives and Copland: A Listener’s Guide. Pompton Plains, N.J.: Amadeus Press, 2004. Provides biographical information on Ives and Aaron Copland to describe how each composer’s experience and training influenced his work, as well as analysis of their musical compositions. Includes a compact disc with performances of some of the composers’ best-known works.

Hitchcock, Hugh Wiley. Ives. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. This slim volume, number 14 in the Oxford Studies in Composers series, concentrates on the techniques of composition employed by Ives. A basic knowledge of music is required to understand this work.

Johnson, Timothy A. Baseball and the Music of Charles Ives: A Proving Ground. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2004. Examines Ives’s compositions within the context of his lifelong love of baseball to determine how this passion influenced his work.

Perlis, Vivian. Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974. A collection of conversations and interviews with friends and associates of Ives from his boyhood through adult life. The book is divided into sections on family life, the insurance business, and his musical career. Provides an excellent portrait of the composer as an individual person.

Rossiter, Frank R. Charles Ives and His America. New York: Liveright, 1975. A well-researched examination of Ives’s life and career, placing him within the cultural and social conditions of his times. Rossiter is especially acute in discussing the tension between Ives’s business life and his creative activities.

1901-1940: 1916: Ives Completes His Fourth Symphony.