Charles Ives
By day he sold insurance; by night and on weekends he wrote music no one would play.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
People around him ⏳🌊
- FamilyGeorge Ives
A former Civil War bandmaster, the father who opened his son's ears with experiments in layering two keys at once and puzzling over quarter tones.
- TeacherHoratio Parker
The teacher who drilled him rigorously in German-style composition at Yale but stayed cool toward Ives's experiments.
- FamilyHarmony Twichell Ives
His wife, a former nurse, who believed in his music to the end through the years when no one would listen.
- FriendshipJulian Myrick
His lifelong partner in building the insurance agency Ives & Myrick, who guarded the time Ives needed to compose.
- FriendshipHenry Cowell
A young composer who published and championed Ives's music in the late 1920s; Ives quietly bankrolled his work.
- InfluenceArnold Schoenberg
Though they never met, he left a note calling Ives a great American composer, helping Ives win recognition after his death.
I. The boy from Danbury · 1874–1893 (age 0–19)
(Birth) Ives was born in October 1874 in Danbury, Connecticut. His father, George Ives, had served in the Civil War as the youngest bandmaster in the Union Army, then came home to lead the town band, the choirs and the church music. Little record survives of his mother, Mary Elizabeth Parmelee. His brother Moss, two years younger, later became a lawyer. (Experiment) His father was no ordinary bandmaster. He had two bands, each playing a different tune, march past each other from opposite sides of the town square so he could hear how the sounds collided, and he tinkered with a quarter-tone device to sound the notes that fall between the piano keys. He had his son sing a song in one key while he played the accompaniment in another, teaching him to "stretch your ears." The roots of Ives's music, in which different musics sound at once, lay right here. (Organ) Ives learned piano, organ, harmony and counterpoint from his father. His father's band played a march he wrote at thirteen, and by around fourteen he had become a paid organist at a Danbury church. At about seventeen he wrote organ variations on the patriotic song 'America', slipping in between the variations short interludes in which two keys sound at once. He later recalled that these interludes were often left out in performance. (Baseball) He was not a boy who lived for music alone. He made a name for himself as the pitcher on his school baseball team, and all his life he prized sport and physical work as manly virtues. That youthful temperament seeped into his scorn for music that was merely genteel and soft.
The first piece in which the teenage Ives, then a church organist, set down the experiments he had learned from his father. His knack for playfully twisting a pious patriotic hymn already shows.
- The theme is 'America', the same melody as the British national anthem. It's worth following how the familiar tune changes its clothes from one variation to the next.
- In the short interludes between the variations, two keys sound at once (polytonality). That moment, when the notes seem briefly to slip out of line, is where Ives's experiments begin.
- The variation in which the keyboard played by the feet (the pedals) races through fast scales is a notorious passage. Ives recalled, more or less, that playing it was as much fun as baseball.
- In the variation set to the dance rhythm of a polonaise and in the grandly inflated final variation, you can hear a humor that seems to poke fun at pomposity.
- The orchestral arrangement made in 1964 by the composer William Schuman is also widely performed. It's fun to hear it alongside the organ original.
II. Yale and his father's death · 1893–1898 (age 19–24)
(Yale) In 1893 he entered the Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven to prepare for Yale, and the following fall he enrolled there. Throughout his years at Yale he worked as organist at Center Church in New Haven, earning pocket money and help with tuition. His grades were poor, but he had many friends and won popularity writing songs and marches for club events. (Loss) In November 1894, just two months after he enrolled, his father died suddenly of a stroke. He was forty-nine. Ives never filled that void, and all his life he held up his father as his musical and moral ideal. The band marches and village hymns that so often surface in his later works were in large part memories of the music his father had led. (Parker) His teacher at Yale was the composer Horatio Parker, who had studied with Rheinberger in Munich. Under him Ives rigorously learned counterpoint, orchestration and sonata form. But Parker was cold toward his father's sort of experiments with layered keys, and Ives began to split his writing between pieces for class and experimental works of his own. Ives's recollections preserve an anecdote in which Parker chided him, "Do you mean to hog all the keys at once?" (Symphony) His Symphony No. 1, finished around graduation, dutifully follows the European tradition his teacher taught. The English horn melody in the slow movement recalls Dvořák's 'New World' Symphony, premiered in New York in 1893, and shadows of Tchaikovsky and Brahms fall here and there. He graduated from Yale in 1898.
A symphony that fills the European frame he learned from Parker with his father's band and the songs of the town. It lay unheard for nearly fifty years until Bernstein premiered it in 1951.
- The work is in five movements. The earnest string writing at the opening sounds Brahmsian, but fragments of American hymns and folk songs soon drift in.
- In the final movement the patriotic song 'Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean', the dance tune 'Turkey in the Straw' and an army bugle reveille pop out one after another. Don't miss the passage where the horn lazily sings a Stephen Foster song.
- At the very end, the orchestra blurts out nearly every note at once in a short dissonance (a chord of clashing notes) that sounds like 'a Bronx cheer'. Each conductor handles its length and force differently.
- Bernstein's recordings are the standard benchmark for this piece. Listen for how long he holds the final chord.
III. The insurance clerk · 1898–1907 (age 24–33)
(Employment) After graduation he went to New York and became a junior clerk at the Mutual Life Insurance Company. To make a living from music, he reasoned, he would have to cater to public taste. He is said to have remarked, in effect, that he could not let his family starve on his dissonances. He lived with Yale classmates in a rented apartment they called 'Poverty Flat', and on weekends he played the organ at churches in New Jersey and New York. (Resignation) In the spring of 1902 his cantata 'The Celestial Country' premiered at Central Presbyterian Church in New York, where he was organist. The reviews were polite but lukewarm. That year he gave up his church post and, for all practical purposes, abandoned the path of a professional musician. From then on he composed at night after work and on weekends. With no prospect of performance, his experiments grew, if anything, more unbridled. (Colleague) At the company he met Julian Myrick, who worked at the Raymond agency. A few years younger than Ives, Myrick had a gift for business and for managing people, and the two would become lifelong partners. In late 1906 Ives's health broke down from overwork, and he went with Myrick to a resort in Virginia to rest. (Contemplation) That same year he wrote two short orchestral pieces grouped as 'Two Contemplations': 'The Unanswered Question' and 'Central Park in the Dark'. The first depicts a question about existence; the second, the noises that drift together from afar in a park at night. Here his way of layering different times and places on a single stage came into sharp focus. (Reunion) Around this time he grew close again to Harmony, the older sister of his Yale friend David Twichell. In 1907 the two became engaged.
One of the 'Two Contemplations', written when he had given up a career in music and was experimenting alone. It stages the question of existence in three layers of sound.
- From beginning to end the strings sustain slow chords, very softly (ppp). Ives described this as 'the silences of the Druids', a stillness that knows nothing and sees nothing.
- The trumpet asks the same question seven times. Ives called it 'the perennial question of existence'. Keep in mind that brief phrase with no fixed key (atonal).
- The 'answer' of the four flutes grows faster, louder and more quarrelsome with each round. In the end they give up answering and scatter as if mocking the trumpet.
- After the last question the flutes fall silent, and only the stillness of the strings remains. Because the score asks for the strings to be placed offstage, the sense of distance is even sharper in the concert hall.
- So emblematic did it become of the questions of 20th-century music that Bernstein took the title of his 1973 Harvard lectures from it.
IV. Harmony · 1907–1914 (age 33–40)
(Partnership) When the agency where he worked closed in January 1907, Ives founded Ives & Company with Myrick, renaming it Ives & Myrick in 1909. Ives was the theorist who designed the products and trained the salesmen; Myrick was the manager who built the organization. The firm grew quickly and in time became one of the leading insurance agencies in America. (Marriage) In June 1908 he married Harmony Twichell. Harmony had worked as a nurse, and her father, the Reverend Joseph Twichell, was a longtime friend of Mark Twain. Her father performed the ceremony. A Sunday morning on their honeymoon, when they walked together along the Housatonic River at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, became some years later the last piece of 'Three Places in New England'. Ives recalled that, unlike others, Harmony alone never found his music strange. (Loss) In the spring of 1909, after a miscarriage, Harmony underwent major surgery and could no longer have children. The couple carried this in their hearts for a long time. In 1912 they bought land in West Redding, Connecticut, and built a house there the following summer; it became their lifelong refuge. (Mahler) By Ives's account, around 1910 Mahler, then leading the New York Philharmonic, saw his Symphony No. 3 at a copyist's office and showed interest in performing it. Mahler died in 1911, and the story is not confirmed anywhere outside Ives's own records. (Peak) The years after his marriage were his ripest as a composer. He began work on his Symphony No. 4 and wrote 'Three Places in New England' and several movements of the 'Holidays Symphony'. From the monument to a Black Civil War regiment, to the Revolutionary War encampment at Redding, to the riverbank of their honeymoon, his pieces set out from specific places and memories.
A work from the ripest years after his marriage; all three pieces set out from specific places and memories. The last is the honeymoon walk with Harmony.
- The first piece, 'The St. Gaudens in Boston Common,' depicts the monument honoring a Black regiment of the Civil War. Within a rhythm like heavy, dragging footsteps, fragments of old songs rise like mist.
- In the second piece, 'Putnam's Camp,' a child on a picnic dreams of Revolutionary War soldiers. The passage where two bands march at the same time, at different tempos, and collide recalls his father's experiments exactly.
- In the third piece, 'The Housatonic at Stockbridge,' the strings overlap in different rhythms to create a mist over the river. Above it, a hymn tune slowly rises.
- At the end of the third piece, the sound swells enormously, then breaks off suddenly, leaving only soft strings. How a conductor handles this drop is the heart of any comparison.
V. Concord · 1914–1918 (age 40–44)
(Adoption) At their West Redding house, the Iveses helped poor city families spend the summer. When an infant from one such family, the Osbornes, fell ill, Harmony nursed her; in 1915 the couple took the child in, and the following year they formally adopted her. She was Edith Osborne Ives. Ives cherished his daughter dearly. (Lusitania) In May 1915 the ocean liner Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine. That evening, on an elevated-train platform at Hanover Square in New York, Ives heard people, one by one, join in singing a hymn. The experience became the final movement of Orchestral Set No. 2. For him, music always reached toward such shared moments. (Concord) From around 1916 he refined his Piano Sonata No. 2, 'Concord.' The piece portrays, in four movements, the thinkers of nineteenth-century Concord, Massachusetts: Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau. Throughout the sonata he planted the four-note opening motif of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, turning fate's knock into a question of the human spirit. In 'Essays Before a Sonata,' the prose he attached to the work, he defended transcendentalism (the belief that the divine dwells within humanity), while needling Debussy: had he ever sweated to earn a living, his music might have had deeper substance. (War) When the United States entered World War I in 1917, he supported the war, writing songs such as 'In Flanders Fields,' and even tried to go to France with the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). (Collapse) In October 1918 a severe heart attack struck him. Diabetes was diagnosed at the same time. After months of rest he recovered, but the life of composing night after night never returned.
The summit of his thought, which he was refining right up to his heart attack. It transforms Beethoven's fate motif into portraits of the transcendentalist thinkers.
- Hidden throughout all four movements is the four-note opening motif (short-short-short-long) of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Listen for the face it wears in each movement, and the whole work knits together.
- The second movement, 'Hawthorne,' instructs the pianist to press many keys at once with a wooden board about 37 centimeters long. The resulting mass of notes (tone cluster) creates a fantastical tumult.
- The third movement, 'The Alcotts,' is the simplest and warmest. Over a hymnlike melody that seems played on an old parlor piano, the Beethoven motif sings in a gentle major key.
- A viola may optionally be added to the first movement, 'Emerson,' and a flute to the fourth, 'Thoreau.' The flute at the end of the Thoreau movement sounds like a pipe across Walden Pond.
- Notoriously difficult, and it exists in several versions. Kirkpatrick's historic recording and those of later virtuosos differ greatly in tempo and in the version chosen, which makes comparing them a real pleasure.
VI. Cleaning house · 1919–1932 (age 45–58)
(Self-publishing) Once recovered, Ives devoted himself less to new works than to bringing the ones he had already written into the world. In 1920 he printed the 'Concord Sonata' and 'Essays Before a Sonata' at his own expense, and in 1922 the song collection '114 Songs,' sending them free to musicians and critics. Many of the responses were mocking. In the postface to the songbook he wrote that he had made it not for money or fame — "I have merely cleaned house." (Convictions) He was passionate about politics as well. He distrusted party politics and tried to promote a constitutional amendment of his own devising that would let citizens propose and decide laws directly. His view of democracy, trusting in the good sense (良識) of the majority, grew from the same root as his drawing ordinary people's hymns and marches into his symphonies. (Quarter tones) In 1923–24 he wrote 'Three Quarter-Tone Pieces,' for two pianos tuned a quarter tone apart. The son had, in effect, completed the experiment his father had pondered years before. (Silence) Yet his composing gradually came to a halt. Harmony recalled that around 1927 her husband came downstairs with tears in his eyes and said he could not compose anymore — nothing sounded right. The vast 'Universe Symphony' remained unfinished. (Allies) Around this time the young composer Henry Cowell recognized his music and published it in his score journal 'New Music.' The conductor Nicolas Slonimsky performed 'Three Places in New England' in New York and Paris in 1931. Ives quietly paid for these performances and for publications by other experimental composers. In 1930 he retired from business, and in 1932 he left 'Memos,' a dictated record of his music and life.
Only the first two movements were performed in 1927, and Ives never heard the complete work in his lifetime. It is the most colossal question left by a composer who had entered silence.
- In the first movement, a chorus sings the hymn 'Watchman, Tell Us of the Night.' The work opens with the questions of what life is and where it is going.
- The second movement, 'Comedy,' is a pandemonium of marches and songs sounding all at once at different tempos. One conductor is often not enough, and an assistant conductor is frequently added.
- The third movement is, unexpectedly, a tidy fugue (a piece in which the same tune passes from voice to voice in pursuit). After the tumult of the previous movement, this orderly sound of faith forms a contrast.
- In the fourth movement, the percussion keeps its own separate beat from beginning to end. A wordless chorus holds the tune of 'Nearer, My God, to Thee,' then recedes as the work fades away.
- In 1965 Stokowski gave the complete premiere with two assistant conductors. Since then, how transparently performers reveal its intricate layers has become the measure of a great performance.
VII. Late recognition · 1933–1954 (age 59–80)
(Seclusion) After retiring, Ives lived quietly, moving between his house on 74th Street in New York and West Redding. Diabetes and heart disease made his hands tremble, and he kept away from newspapers and concerts. He rarely appeared even where his own works were performed. (Premiere) In January 1939, the pianist John Kirkpatrick played the 'Concord Sonata' at Town Hall in New York, after years of learning it. The critic Lawrence Gilman wrote that it was the greatest music composed by an American. It was the moment when music that had lain in a drawer for nearly 20 years finally met its audience. (Schoenberg) Around the same time, Schoenberg, then in exile in America, left a note saying that a great composer was living in this country — a man who answered others' neglect with contempt and was not obliged to accept either praise or blame, and whose name was Ives. The note was found among Schoenberg's effects after his death in 1951. (Pulitzer) In 1946 the composer Lou Harrison premiered the Third Symphony, which won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. It had been written some 40 years earlier. Saying that prizes were for boys, Ives gave away much of the prize money. In 1951 Leonard Bernstein premiered the Second Symphony with the New York Philharmonic. Ives is said not to have gone to the concert hall but to have listened on the radio. (Death) On May 19, 1954, he died of a stroke following surgery in New York. He was seventy-nine. He was buried in a cemetery in his hometown of Danbury. His daughter Edith followed him two years later, and Harmony in 1969. The Fourth Symphony received its complete premiere only 11 years after his death.
A modest piece from his youth, premiered only some 40 years later and awarded the Pulitzer Prize. It stands as the emblem of recognition that came late.
- The subtitle 'The Camp Meeting' refers to the revivals where country people gathered outdoors to worship for days at a time. All three movements are built on the hymns of such gatherings.
- In the first movement, 'Old Folks Gatherin',' hymn tunes pass among the instruments and overlap as if in conversation. It is based on organ pieces Ives wrote in his years as a church organist.
- The second movement, 'Children's Day,' is lively. It sounds like children who tagged along to the meeting, running about at play.
- The third movement, 'Communion,' is based on 'Woodworth,' the tune of the hymn 'Just As I Am.' Near the end, listen closely for bells that seem to ring from far away. Ives called such sounds 'shadow parts.'
- Scored for a small chamber orchestra, it sounds clearer than his other symphonies. It is considered the most approachable work for anyone hearing Ives for the first time.
Lesser-known stories
(Dating) Ives stated that many of his works were written in the early 1900s, and so for a long time he was presented as a pioneer of dissonance who preceded Schoenberg and Stravinsky. But in 1987 the musicologist Maynard Solomon raised the possibility that he had backdated his works and added dissonances later. Gayle Sherwood Magee then analyzed the types of manuscript paper and changes in his handwriting, concluding that the actual composition dates of many pieces were several years later than Ives claimed. Scholars, however, generally see this less as deliberate deception than as the habit of a man who revised his music all his life and remembered each piece by the moment he first conceived it. Popular biographies still often print the old dates unchanged. (Insurance) In the American insurance industry, Ives is remembered not as a composer but as an innovator. Around 1918 he wrote 'The Amount to Carry,' a training text for salesmen. Setting out a method for determining coverage by weighing a family's income and needs, it is regarded today as an early form of estate planning. He opened a school for agents and taught there himself, and most of his colleagues reportedly did not even know he composed. (Patronage) He anonymously funded not only his own music but also the publication and performance of works by contemporary experimental composers. His money was a large part of why Cowell's 'New Music' survived so long. Like his giving away of the Pulitzer money, this patronage was little known at the time, because he preferred not to put his name to it.
Glossary notes 📚🔎
Polytonality (多調性)
(Literal meaning) A quality in which many (多) keys (調) exist together. When there are only two keys, it is also called bitonality. (In music) Ordinary music moves around a single central pitch and scale, as in 'C major'; this is called a key. Polytonality sounds melodies or harmonies in different keys at the same time. Ives's father had people sing a song in one key while he played the accompaniment in another. Imagine singing the same song with a friend, one of you starting on 'do' and the other on 're,' and carrying on that way to the end. That sound — seemingly at odds, yet strangely moving together — is polytonality.
Quotation
(Literal meaning) To draw (引) in and use (用). (In music) Placing a melody from an existing piece into one's own work, either as is or slightly altered. Ives quoted countless melodies — hymns, marches, folk songs, patriotic songs, even Beethoven symphonies. His hallmark was layering many quotations at once to create a landscape of memory. If you cut out photos of your friends and paste them into a birthday card, each photo belongs to someone else, yet the card as a whole becomes a new work. Ives's quotations are exactly like that. (Elsewhere) In writing, it refers to bringing over someone else's words in quotation marks.
Tone cluster
(Literal meaning) The English 'tone cluster' means a bunch or lump (cluster) of tones (tone). In Korean it is also called eumgoe (音塊), that is, eum deongeori ('lump of notes'). (In music) A massed sound made by pressing or sounding many adjacent notes at once. On the piano, the keys are pressed with the palm or forearm — or, as in Ives's 'Concord Sonata,' with a wooden board. Think of the 'whaang' that sounds when you drop your arm onto a piano keyboard. The difference is that the composer plans that sound and uses it on purpose. (Elsewhere) In computing, a cluster also refers to an arrangement in which several computers are linked to work as one.
Quarter tone
(Meaning of the word) A note made by dividing (分) a whole tone into four (4). It is half of a semitone. (In music) On the piano, the distance between two directly neighboring keys is a semitone. A quarter tone splits that semitone in half again, an interval so tiny that an ordinary piano cannot produce it. Ives created this sound by tuning one of two pianos a quarter tone higher than the other. Cover a recorder hole only halfway and you get an uncertain note lying between two fixed pitches; that in-between pitch is exactly this kind of minute interval.
Variations
(Meaning of the word) Byeonju (變奏) means 'to play (奏) with changes (變).' (In music) A piece that first presents a single theme melody, then plays that theme again and again, altering its rhythm, harmony, tempo, and mood each time. The skeleton of the theme remains, so the listener can still recognize it. The same instant ramen may get cheese, a fiery sauce, or be turned into stir-fried noodles; the taste changes, yet you can still tell it is ramen. Variations cook a theme in just that way. (Elsewhere) In everyday speech, as in 'a variation on the same story,' it figuratively describes something whose basic frame stays the same while only its shape changes.
Dissonance
(Meaning of the word) Bulhyeophwaeum: notes that do not (不) harmonize (協和), that is, a chord whose tones clash when sounded together. (In music) A chord whose simultaneous notes sound tense or rough. Its opposite, a chord that blends comfortably, is a consonance. In traditional music, a dissonance was soon resolved into a consonance. Ives and other twentieth-century composers sometimes left dissonance unresolved, using it for its own sake. The sound of several classes in a gymnasium each singing a different cheer is much like dissonance: noisy, yet full of vivid energy. (Elsewhere) In everyday speech, people say 'there was dissonance' to describe a clash of opinions between people or groups.