61 Charles ives, the first truly american composer (1874-1954)

Charles Ives (1874-1954) is one of the most extraordinary and individual figures in the history of Western music. American music owes its existence as a separate phenomenon to his work.

In his music, many of innovatory and radical procedures adopted by younger avant-garde composers are anticipated or foreshadowed in

some degree.

Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1874. Throughout his life he cleaved to* New England: its countryside colours his music, and its characteristic philosophy (that of Emerson* and Thoreau*) seems to have influenced his technique. His father, a town bandmaster, experimented with tone clusters, polytonality, quartertones, and acoustics, inspiring similar interests in his son. George Ives, the father, exerted an important musical influence on his son. Naturally experimental himself, he constantly encouraged Charles to tinker with unfamiliar sounds, to investigate, as it were, what music could do rather than what it merely had done. He would make Charles sing in a key different from the accompaniment "to stretch our ears".

Ives later maintained that many of the more startling effects in his music were aural memories from his childhood: memories of hymn-tunes wrongly harmonized, or of accidental coincidences of sound in a small-town environment. Ives's earliest musical training was almost entirely unconventional. When he entered Yale University, in 1894, he tried hard to absorb an academic training, but failed. In 1898 he graduated and moved to New York as a clerk in an ensurance company, taking up several organist posts.

Ives's First Symphony, a student work, and his Second Symphony (1901) mix European influences (notably Beethoven and Dvorak). Ives divided his time between business and music knowing that his music had no hope of commercial success, or even performance. While working daily in an insurance office, Ives was composing some of the most extraordinary music ever written. From this period (1901-28) date the Third and Fourth Symphonies, the Concord Sonata for piano, Three Places in New England, the Holidays Symphony, the four violin sonatas, the Tone Roads for small orchestra, and various smaller orchestral works. In 1928 Ives was forced by illness to give up composition, and in 1930 he retired from insurance and thereafter spent all his time at his farm in Connecticut. He died in 1954.

Even after his retirement his music made its way very slowly. The earliest publications were at his own expense: of the Concord Sonata in 1919 and of the 114 Songs in 1922. Later, in the 1920s and 1930s a few scattered performances were put on. But the major works remained practically known until the 1950s. The Third Symphony won a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, but the Fourth Symphony

62

was not played at all until 1965 (when Stokowski conducted it), the Second Symphony not until 1951.

The modernisms in Ives's style are impressive precisely because they arise from philosophy rather than aesthetic theory. His potentiality and polyrhythms* gave a genuine and infectious exuberance which springs from a real contact with life.

Ives's true importance lies in having given American music self-respect. In this he represents young America as against old Europe to whom the United States were still a cultural province. And this has been the source of his strength and powers of renewal since his death.

Based on: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music; The Dictionary of Composers