October sees the 150th anniversary of the birth of the American composer, Charles Ives. It also marks the 70th anniversary of his death. Despite the fact that Ives sits nowadays among the pantheon of American classical composers, there’s no denying that he was almost totally ignored during his lifetime. Indeed, there are still those today who wonder why Ives has been elevated to such heights.
Right from his early days he was a musical iconoclast. An excellent organist, he studied music at Yale University under Harry Shelley, a pupil of Dvorak and the Professor of Music, Horatio Parker. Neither man could make head nor tail of Ives’s experimentations and struggled to keep the young man within accepted musical bounds. He was on the whole a disappointing student, spending much of his time composing football marches, drinking songs and organ pieces. However, when he was 22, he wrote his first string quartet, and two years later his first symphony.
It began in D major, but almost immediately broke away into a different key, and then several other keys followed.
This was too much for the European-trained Horatio Parker, who insisted that Ives follow the accepted Germanic tradition of symphony writing. Reluctantly Ives acquiesced and rewrote the first movement. But he wasn’t happy with it and, having shown Parker that he was capable of following his rules, persuaded the professor to allow him to return the work to its original version, the one which we hear today. It may tell you something that the symphony was not actually published until 1971, 17 years after his death.
This was typical of Ives. His musical experiments took some odd detours, on one occasion getting his family members to all sing at once in different keys, and on another asking a band to separate and play in different keys and tempos to see what it sounded like. One can only imagine the cacophony!
Charles Ives graduated from Yale, but didn’t enter the musical world. He decided to make his career in life insurance on the grounds that it was an uplifting and humanitarian calling. This was to be his primary source of income for the rest of his life. Ives is often credited with being one of the first composers to employ techniques that would later become staples of modernist music. His compositional style was characterised by its use of dissonance and unconventional chord progressions. He was one of the earliest composers to use cluster chords – groups of adjacent notes played together to create a dense, dissonant sound.
This approach can be heard in pieces like The Unanswered Question, where the interplay between the string instruments and the trumpet creates a strikingly modern sonic landscape as they operate on seemingly different levels. His innovative use of polytonality, rhythmic complexity, and dissonance are now seen to have paved the way for future composers such as Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and even avant-garde figures like John Cage and Steve Reich. His approach to composition has cast him as a pioneer in breaking away from traditional musical constraints. The strange thing was that Ives never seemed to care whether his work was played or not, and most of it wasn’t performed in his lifetime.
He was a retiring man, so much so that he had a hidden entrance constructed so that he could come and go from his private office without being seen. By all accounts visitors were discouraged. The outbreak of World War I, and America’s involvement, outraged Ives and he lobbied Congress to ensure that in future no declaration of war be made without a public referendum. Congress ignored him. He had worked himself up into a fury and in September 1918, aged 44, he suffered a major heart attack. He survived, but was never a well man again, dying in New York in May 1954.
-Michael Morton-Evans