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The music of Charles Ives is deeply rooted in memories of his happy childhood, which he spent surrounded by diverse types of music. Ives was a belatedly acknowledged pioneer of American modern music, composing imaginative and original works that combine vernacular, trivial, spiritual, and art music — genres previously understood as irreconcilable.
Throughout Ives’s artistic journey, his father deeply influenced his practice and acted as an instigator, guide, and model. George Ives had benefited from a thorough training in classical music, including theory and counterpoint, in New York with a teacher from Germany. His background, along with his activity as the bandmaster of the Danbury marching band, opened his son’s mind — and ears — to popular music. George taught his son counterpoint and theory through the works of J. S. Bach and other great masters of Western art music, thus making Charles aware of the importance of rigorous compositional technique.
George was nonetheless partial to musical experimentation: he warned Charles against all forms of academicism and urged him to give full range to his creative impulses, no matter how transgressive or daring. Charles described how his father would practice polytonality by having his family sing a song like “Swanee River” in E-flat while he accompanied in C.1 The elder Ives also experimented with microtonality, which inspired one of his son’s last pieces, Three Quarter-Tone Pieces (1923-1924). On musical instruments, George sought to imitate various sound events, be they created by men or by nature. Years after his father’s death, Charles Ives would compose Central Park in the Dark (1906), which, according to his program notes, is a “picture-in-sound of the sounds of nature and of happenings that men would hear […] when sitting on a bench in Central Park on a hot summer night.” George also enjoyed creating unexpected polyrhythms and polyharmonies, namely by crossing — in a delightful sonic confusion — two marching bands while they played different tunes. One can hear the influence that this experience had on Charles in the second movement of Three Places in New England, “Putnam’s Camp, Redding, Connecticut” (1912), which includes a sound clash created by two orchestral ensembles simultaneously playing two different types of music.
George also introduced his son to the music of Stephen Foster, who, in the nineteenth century, had risen to fame with songs like “Old Black Joe,” “Massa’s in de Cold Ground,” “Oh! Susanna,” and “Swanee River.” Charles greatly admired the composer who had given the American song its credentials, and would later cite and paraphrase his songs at length. He even dreamed, early on in his career, of becoming Foster’s successor.
Charles played in his father’s marching band, often at the drums. He became familiar with various types of popular music through this experience. He remained emotionally attached to these popular practices, as testified by the evocation of a street parade in The Circus Band (circa 1894) — where the piano imitates the percussion — and by the parody of an amateur and out-of-tune orchestra in “Country Band” March for Theater Orchestra (1903).
Finally, George trained his son as a remarkable pianist, and even envisioned his career as a concert pianist. The young Charles, however, instead pursued a career as an organist.
In the midst of this broad and opened sound world, and through a non-hierarchical approach to various musical practices, Charles Ives forged, in his teenage years, his identity as a composer.
One of Ives’s earliest works is Holiday Quickstep for Theater Orchestra, which his father conducted in 1888 at Danbury’s Taylor Opera House. Most other early compositions are marches, such as March No. 2 “The Son of a Gambolier” (circa 1892), or hymns, sentimental salon melodies, or daring organ pieces. Variations on “America” (circa 1892) is an example of the last; it includes two interludes that contain bitonality, already revealing Ives’s fondness for musical cheekiness and humor.
In 1893, Ives moved to New Haven to prepare for his studies at Yale University. Around this time, he composed a considerable body of work for religious services, as well as pieces that reveal willpower, creativity, and a talent for experimentation inherited from his father. A notable piece from this year is Song for Harvest Season, in which a fugue subject enters four times, each time transposed by a fourth. During the summer of 1894, he composed a series of psalms — perhaps inspired by his experience with church choirs — in which he used polytonality (Psalm 67), whole-tone scales (Psalm 54), and independent layers to organize the voices (Psalm 150). He tried his hand at an interval-based structure, where each verse is built around a different interval (Psalm 24). He created tonal ambiguity by using non-functional modulations and building dissonances between root-position chords. He even motioned toward atonality by using clusters and complex aggregates. These experiments, carried out meticulously and methodologically, served him in his later works. Ives also had an intensive professional life as an organist. He secured a position at the Center Church in New Haven (1895-1898) and played at other churches in Bloomfield, New Jersey, and New York until 1902.
Between 1894 and 1898, Ives studied composition at Yale with Horatio Parker. Like many other American composers of his generation, Parker had studied in Germany and consequently strived to defend and transmit the German musical heritage. For Ives, Parker represented the antithesis of his father, namely because of the former’s visceral rejection of experimental works, of his contempt for popular music, and his exclusive interest for the Great European — especially German — art music traditions. Nonetheless, even though Ives later criticized his teacher’s academic style for curbing his creativity, Parker’s teaching was valuable. His lessons enabled Ives to deepen his musical knowledge, namely with respect to orchestration and large forms. Parker also taught Ives how to make qualitative distinctions between “utilitarian” and often superficial music — of the kind played in Danbury — and “pure” music from the highest European art traditions. Under Parker, Ives composed String Quartet No. 1 “From the Salvation Army” (1896), whose last movement contains citations from hymns, Symphony No. 1 (1896-1998) — influenced by Johannes Brahms and Antonín Dvořák — as well as lieder and settings of poems, such as Ich grolle nicht (1898).
Outside his church engagements and the constraints imposed by Parker, Ives led a fruitful musical life. He became known on campus for composing light music for the marching bands, songs like The Bells of Yale (1897-1898) for the university choirs, and pieces for student parties. The piece Yale-Princeton Football Game (1898), which depicts in music a sports event, testifies to Ives’s interest in sound atmospheres. Ives also spent time in vaudeville theaters. He was a regular pianist at the Hyperion Theater, where he performed improvisations and ragtime, a genre he held in high regard and later used in Ragtime Dances (1902-1904).
In 1898, Ives moved to New York to work in an insurance company, in a position that would give him financial independence. He was no longer obligated to follow the rigid academic style that Parker taught, but he nonetheless composed the cantata The Celestial Country (1898-1899) to contain explicit references to his former teacher’s oratorio, Hora Novissima. He also composed Symphony No. 2 (1900-1902), which, though steeped in European romantic traditions, uses popular melodies and religious hymns that evoke a distinctive American sound. In 1902, perhaps disappointed by the lukewarm reactions to the premiere of The Celestial Country, he quit his activities as an organist and refused all professional engagements as a performer. He gave up his career as a professional musician and preferred to make a living in business. From then on, he composed freely in the evenings and weekends, far from the conservatism of musical institutions and the opinions of music critics.
Although some pieces from this period harken to traditional classical genres, Ives completely stopped writing pure music. During his university studies, he had deepened his knowledge of works by the great writers, and he was now becoming increasingly interested in the idea that music could translate the spirit of literature. He thus turned to a programmatic approach to composition, where memories of sounds from his childhood and student life became his primary inspiration. For example, Symphony No. 3: The Camp Meeting (1901-1904) and Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 4 “Children’s Day at the Camp Meeting” both refer to the religious gatherings he attended as a child in Danbury.
Freed from Parker’s influence, Ives returned to the teachings of his father. He composed such experimental pieces as From the Steeples and the Mountains (1901-1902), a polytonal and atonal piece for four sets of bells and two brass instruments, and Hallowe’en for string quartet and piano (1906), which uses aleatory elements: the piece is played several times, while the performers change freely the instrument combinations, tempi, and dynamics. Ives often associated humor and experimentalism. For example, in the second movement of the Trio for Violin, Cello, and Piano (1904-1905) entitled “TSIAJ” (standing for This Scherzo is a Joke), a large number of songs and hymns follow one another without interruption, in a gleeful polytonal jumble. The Gong on the Hook and Ladder or Firemen’s Parade on Main Street (1911) uses atonality, polyrhythm, irrational time durations, and meter changes.
During this period, Ives also composed the two Contemplations: The Unanswered Question and Central Park in the Dark (1906). In both, Ives played with contrasting layers of sound: in the first, the string section creates a simple tonal background on which wind instruments intervene with atonal music, whereas in the second, the strings create an atonal background that accompanies popular music motives played by the other instruments. These Contemplations reveal another facet of Ives’s music, in which profound existential and metaphysical questions come to the fore. For example, in The Unanswered Question the trumpet repeats, according to Ives, the perennial question of existence.2 The aesthetic program of his Symphony No. 4, written only a few years later, is similar: the prelude invokes the human quest for existential truth, and the following three movements are Existence’s answers to humanity’s questions.
A decade of creative maturity preceded Ives’s heart attack in 1918. Over several years, he wrote a series of large-scale works that draw material from his preexisting compositions, which renders their chronology nearly impossible to determine. For example, the Symphony No. 4 (1910-1916) uses elements from fourteen previous works. In these masterpieces, Ives reached a proficiency in composition hitherto unknown in American music. In the second and fourth movements of the Symphony No. 4, as well as in the String Quartet No. 2 (1907-1913) and other pieces, the counterpoint encompasses tonal, atonal, chromatic, diatonic, and whole-tone strata, which create fluid heterophonic textures and highly complex polyrhythms. Musical citations abound in these mature works. In The Fourth of July (1911-1913), the popular patriotic songs “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and “Marching through Georgia” are superposed as to create a highly dissonant polytonal and polyrhythmic texture. Ives henceforth cited hymns, patriotic and popular songs, and themes from the art music canon in fragments, like fleeting memories. The coherence of these works can, paradoxically, be found in their unique profusion of heterogeneous music. Ives was composing in a context in which American composers strived to free themselves from the European masters — whose influence was limited to the greater urban centers. In a country where most music took the form of marches, hymns, and popular songs, the second Viennese School composers and Igor Stravinsky were for the most part unknown. Starting in the late 1920s, a young generation of American composers, in the process of constructing their own identity, would begin to discover Ives and his pioneering work.
Ives’s musical maturity was reached in parallel with his increasing involvement with the spiritual values of transcendental philosophy. According to the transcendentalist and Unitarian theologian William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), transcendentalism asserted the inalienable integrity of mankind and the immanence of the Divine in human instincts. The philosophy constructed the thrilling notion of human nature as divine and gave primacy to individual conscience. Ives adopted this idealistic movement, which, like himself, was the fruit of New England culture. Transcendentalism’s opposition to anything that could limit individual thought or action and its rejection of dogma, tradition, herd-like mentalities, and authority, be it religious or secular, resonated with Ives’s aversion for restricting musical conventions, aesthetic diktat, and conservative American musical institutions, which had led him to withdraw from the New York music scene. Ives named all four movements of the Second Sonata for Piano “Concord, Mass. 1840-60” (1911-1915) after famous figures of the Concord School of Philosophy (I. Emerson; II. Hawthorne; III. The Alcotts; IV. Thoreau). His Essays before a Sonata, self-published in 1920, testify to the influence of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson’s idealism, his trust in intuition and experience, as well as his belief in the innate kindness of men, God, and nature represented for Ives the perfect combination of spirituality, creativity, and industry. In the Essays, the closing lines of the prologue testify to Ives’s universal and visionary conception of music: “But we would rather believe,” he wrote,
that music is beyond any analogy to word language, and that the time is coming, but not in our lifetime, when it will develop possibilities inconceivable now, — a language so transcendent, that its heights and depths will be common to all mankind.3
Ives’s transcendentalism was combined with other values he held dear. Among these were patriotism—as seen in his Holidays Symphony (1897-1913), where each movement is named after an American celebration or holiday (I. Washington’s Birthday; II. Decoration Day; III. The Fourth of July; IV. Thanksgiving)—as well as social and humanitarian issues, as in The Anti-Abolitionist Riots for piano (1908) and in songs like Lincoln, the Great Commoner (1913), An Election (1921), and Majority (The Masses) (1921).
The United States’ entry into war in 1917 deeply affected Ives and disillusioned him. Health problems (heart attacks and chronic depression) also impaired his creativity. Between 1919 and 1921, he nonetheless managed to gather some of his previously composed songs and to write some twenty new ones. The 114 Songs were self-published in 1922. After Sunrise (August 1926), Ives completely gave up composition, leaving some works unfinished. His most ambitious work would have been the Universe Symphony, written in three sections: I. Past: Formation of the Waters and Mountains; II. Present: Earth, Evolution in Nature and Humanity; III. Future: Heaven, the Rise of All to the Spiritual. Ives had envisioned that the work would be played by two or more orchestras positioned in valleys and on mountainsides, where the music would imitate “the eternal pulse,” the planetary movement of the earth, and the outline of the mountains reaching toward the sky.
1. Cited in Henry and Sydney COWELL, Charles Ives and His Music, New York, Oxford University Press, 1955, pp. 28-29.↩
2. Ives in the foreword to the score.↩
3. Charles IVES, Essays before a Sonata, London: Knickerboker Press, 1920, 10.↩
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Do you notice a mistake?