Charles Ives

Charles Ives was born on 20 October 1874 in Danbury, a small town in Connecticut in the United States. His father, George Ives, a former army bandmaster in the Civil War, led the town band. He was a curious, experimental musician: he had his family sing in one key while he played the accompaniment in another, had two bands march from opposite directions to hear their music collide, and invented instruments to play notes between the notes. These experiments deeply influenced his son.

Charles learned piano, organ, cornet and drums. At fourteen he became the salaried organist of a Danbury church, the youngest in the state. He was already composing marches for his father’s band and organ pieces such as the Variations on “America” (around 1891), in which he had fun playing the patriotic hymn with unexpected harmonies. He was also an excellent athlete, passionate about baseball and American football.

From 1894 to 1898 he studied at Yale University, attending the classes of the composer Horatio Parker, a very academic teacher who had little time for his daring. His father’s death in 1894 was an immense shock. After his studies, rather than becoming a professional musician, he chose to work in insurance in New York so as to be free to compose as he wished, without depending on public taste. He also remained a church organist until 1902.

In 1907 he founded with Julian Myrick the insurance agency Ives & Myrick, which became one of the largest in the United States. Ives was an innovative businessman: he wrote pamphlets on how to sell life insurance and devised estate-planning methods still in use. In 1908 he married Harmony Twichell, a pastor’s daughter and nurse, who supported his vocation. They adopted a daughter, Edith. Ives composed in the evenings, at weekends and on holiday.

His music was extraordinarily daring for its time. He layered melodies in several keys at once (polytonality), different rhythms, bands, hymns, popular songs and patriotic tunes, as one hears them in real life at a village fair or a parade. In The Unanswered Question (1906) a trumpet asks seven times “the perennial question of existence”, which flutes try in vain to answer, above slow, calm strings. In Central Park in the Dark he depicts the night sounds of the park.

He composed many works inspired by New England: Three Places in New England (1914); the Piano Sonata No. 2, “Concord” (completed in 1915), portraying the writers of the town of Concord — Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts and Thoreau — in which the pianist must sometimes press the keys with a wooden board; and the Symphony No. 4 (1916), of staggering complexity. But almost no one played his music, which was thought incomprehensible or unplayable. In 1918 a serious heart attack forced him to slow down; he composed almost nothing after 1927.

In 1922 he published at his own expense a collection of 114 Songs, which he sent free to anyone who asked. Gradually musicians discovered his work. In 1939 the pianist John Kirkpatrick gave the first complete performance of the “Concord” Sonata in New York, to great acclaim. In 1947 Ives received the Pulitzer Prize for his Symphony No. 3, written forty years earlier; he gave the money away, declaring that “prizes are for boys”. He died in New York on 19 May 1954. He is now regarded as the first great American modernist composer.