Charles Ives

Early life and education

Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut, on October 20, 1874, the son of George (Edward) Ives, a US Army bandleader in the American Civil War, and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Ives. The Iveses, descended from founding colonists of Connecticut, were one of Danbury's leading families, and they were prominent in business and civic improvement. They were similarly active in progressive social movements of the 19th century, including the abolition of slavery.

George Ives directed bands, choirs, and orchestras, and taught music theory and a number of instruments. Charles got his influences by sitting in the Danbury town square and listening to his father's marching band and other bands on other sides of the square simultaneously. His father taught him and his brother (Joseph) Moss Ives (February 5, 1876 – April 7, 1939) music, teaching harmony and counterpoint and guided his first compositions; George took an open-minded approach to theory, encouraging him to experiment in bitonal and polytonal harmonizations. It was from him that Ives also learned the music of Stephen Foster. He became a church organist at the age of 14 and wrote various hymns and songs for church services, including his Variations on "America", which he wrote for a Fourth of July concert in Brewster, New York. It is considered challenging even by modern concert organists, but he famously spoke of it as being "as much fun as playing baseball", a commentary on his own organ technique at that age.

Ives moved to New Haven, Connecticut, in 1893, enrolling in the Hopkins School, where he captained the baseball team. In September 1894, Ives entered Yale University, studying under Horatio Parker. Here he composed in a choral style similar to his mentor, writing church music and even an 1896 campaign song for William McKinley. On November 4, 1894, his father died, a crushing blow to him, but to a large degree, he continued the musical experimentation he had begun with him. His brother Moss later became a lawyer.

At Yale, Ives was a prominent figure; he was a member of HeBoule, Delta Kappa Epsilon (Phi chapter) and Wolf's Head Society, and sat as chairman of the Ivy Committee. He enjoyed sports at Yale and played on the varsity American football team. Michael C. Murphy, his coach, once remarked that it was a "crying shame" that he spent so much time at music as otherwise he could have been a champion sprinter. His works Calcium Light Night and Yale-Princeton Football Game show the influence of college and sports on Ives's composition. He wrote his Symphony No. 1 as his senior thesis under Parker's supervision. Ives graduated from Yale in 1898, and continued his work as a church organist until May 1902.

Career

Following graduation, Ives started work in the actuarial department of the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York. In 1899, Ives moved to employment with the insurance agency Charles H. Raymond & Co., where he stayed until 1906. In 1907, upon the failure of Raymond & Co., he and his friend Julian Myrick formed their own insurance agency Ives & Co., which later became Ives & Myrick, where he remained until he retired.

During his career as an insurance executive and actuary, Ives devised creative ways to structure life-insurance packages for people of means, which laid the foundation of the modern practice of estate planning. His Life Insurance with Relation to Inheritance Tax, published in 1918, was well received. As a result of this he achieved considerable fame in the insurance industry of his time, with many of his business peers surprised to learn that he was also a composer. In his spare time, he composed music and, until his marriage, worked as an organist in Danbury and New Haven as well as Bloomfield, New Jersey, and New York City.

In 1907, Ives suffered the first of several "heart attacks" (as he and his family called them) that he had throughout his life. These attacks may have been psychological in origin rather than physical. Stuart Feder questions the legitimacy of these heart attacks, as he could not find any medical confirmation of them in previous reports. According to Feder, "For the only reliable information tells us that he suffered from palpitations, not pain, the cardinal symptom of heart attack." Following his recovery from the 1907 attack, Ives entered into one of the most creative periods of his life as a composer.

Ives had a successful career in insurance. He also continued to be a prolific composer until he suffered another of several heart attacks in 1918, after which he composed very little. He wrote his last piece, the song "Sunrise", in August 1926. In 1922, Ives published his 114 Songs, which represents the breadth of his work as a composer—it includes art songs, songs he wrote as a teenager and young man, and highly dissonant songs such as "The Majority".

According to his wife, one day in early 1927, Ives came downstairs with tears in his eyes. He could compose no more, he said; "nothing sounds right". There have been numerous theories advanced to explain the silence of his late years. It seems as mysterious as the last several decades of the life of Jean Sibelius, who stopped composing at almost the same time. While Ives had stopped composing, and was increasingly plagued by health problems, he continued to revise and refine his earlier work, as well as oversee premieres of his music.

Musical career

Ives's career and dedication to music began when he started playing drums in his father's band at a young age. Ives published a large collection of songs, many of which had piano parts. He composed two string quartets and other works of chamber music, though he is now best known for his orchestral music. His work as an organist led him to write Variations on "America" in 1891, which he premiered at a recital celebrating the Fourth of July.

He composed four numbered symphonies as well as a number of works with the word 'Symphony' in their titles, as well as The Unanswered Question (1908), written for the unusual combination of trumpet, four flutes, and string quartet. The Unanswered Question was influenced by the New England writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

Around 1910, Ives began composing his most accomplished works, including the Holiday Symphony and Three Places in New England. The Piano Sonata No. 2: Concord, Mass., 1840-60 (known as the Concord Sonata), was one of his most notable pieces. He started work on this in 1911 and completed most of it in 1915. However, it was not until 1920 that the piece was published. His revised version was not released until 1947. This piece contains one of the most striking examples of his experimentation. In the second movement, he instructed the pianist to use a 14+3⁄4 in (37 cm) piece of wood to create a massive cluster chord. The piece also amply demonstrates Ives's fondness for musical quotation: the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony are quoted in each movement. Sinclair's catalogue also notes less obvious quotations of Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata and various other works.

Another notable piece of orchestral music Ives completed was his Symphony No. 4, which he worked on from 1910 to 1916, with further revisions in the 1920s. This four-movement symphony is notable for its complexity and vast orchestra. A complete performance of the work was not given until 1965, half a century after it was completed and over a decade after Ives's death.

Ives left behind material for an unfinished Universe Symphony, which he was unable to complete despite two decades of work. This was due to his health problems as well as his shifting ideas of the work.

Reception

Ives's music was largely ignored during his life, particularly during the years in which he actively composed. Many of his published works went unperformed even many years after his death in 1954. However, his reputation in more recent years has greatly increased. The Juilliard School commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of his death by performing his music over six days in 2004. His musical experiments, including his increasing use of dissonance, were not well received by his contemporaries. The difficulties in performing the rhythmic complexities in his major orchestral works made them daunting challenges even decades after they were composed.

Early supporters of Ives's music included Henry Cowell, Elliott Carter, and Aaron Copland. Cowell's periodical New Music published a substantial number of Ives's scores (with his approval). But for nearly 40 years, Ives had few performances of his music that he did not personally arrange or financially back. He generally used Nicolas Slonimsky as the conductor. After seeing a copy of Ives's self-published 114 Songs during the 1930s, Copland published a newspaper article praising the collection.

Ives began to acquire some public recognition during the 1930s, with performances of a chamber orchestra version of his Three Places in New England, both in the US and on tour in Europe by conductor Nicolas Slonimsky. The Town Hall (New York City) premiered his Concord Sonata in 1939, featuring pianist John Kirkpatrick. This received favorable commentary in the major New York newspapers. Later, around the time of Ives's death in 1954, Kirkpatrick teamed with soprano Helen Boatwright for the first extended recorded recital of Ives's songs for the obscure Overtone label (Overtone Records catalog number 7). They recorded a new selection of songs for the Ives Centennial Collection that Columbia Records published in 1974.

In the 1940s, Ives met Lou Harrison, a fan of his music who began to edit and promote it. Most notably, Harrison conducted the premiere of the Symphony No. 3, The Camp Meeting (1904) in 1946. The next year, it won Ives the Pulitzer Prize for Music. He gave the prize money away (half of it to Harrison), saying "prizes are for boys, and I'm all grown up".

Ives was a generous financial supporter of twentieth-century music, often financing works that were written by other composers. This he did in secret, telling his beneficiaries that his wife wanted him to do so. Nicolas Slonimsky said in 1971, "He financed my entire career".

Compositions

Note: Because Ives often made several different versions of the same piece, and because his work was generally ignored during his life, it is often difficult to put exact dates on his compositions. The dates given here are sometimes best guesses. There have also been controversial speculations that he purposefully misdated his own pieces earlier or later than actually written.

Variations on "America" for organ (1892)

The Circus Band (a march describing the Circus coming to town)

Psalm settings (14, 42, 54, 67, 90, 135, 150) (1890s)

String Quartet No. 1, From the Salvation Army (1897–1900)

Symphony No. 1 in D minor (1898–1901)

Symphony No. 2 (Ives gave dates of 1899–1902; analysis of handwriting and manuscript paper suggests 1907–1909)

Symphony No. 3, The Camp Meeting (1908–10)

Central Park in the Dark, a sound collage for chamber orchestra (1906, 1909)

The Unanswered Question for chamber group (1908; rev. 1934)

Piano Sonata No. 1 (1909–16)

Emerson Concerto (1913–19)

The Gong on the Hook & Ladder (Firemen's Parade on Main Street) for orchestra, Kv 28

Tone Roads for orchestra No. 1, 'All Roads Lead To the Center' KkV38

A set of 3 Short Pieces, A, Kk W15, No 1 'Largo Cantabile – Hymn' for string quartet & double-bass

Politics

Ives proposed in 1920 that there be a 20th amendment to the U.S. Constitution which would authorize citizens to submit legislative proposals to Congress. Members of Congress would then cull the proposals, selecting 10 each year as referendums for popular vote by the nation's electorate. He even had printed at his own expense several thousand copies of a pamphlet on behalf of his proposed amendment. The pamphlet proclaimed the need to curtail "THE EFFECTS OF TOO MUCH POLITICS IN OUR representative DEMOCRACY". He planned to distribute the pamphlets at the 1920 Republican National Convention, but they arrived from the printer after the convention had ended.

It is stated in the biographical film A Good Dissonance Like a Man that the first of Ives's crippling heart attacks occurred as a result of a World War I-era argument with a young Franklin D. Roosevelt over his idea of issuing of war bonds in amounts as low as $50 each. Roosevelt was chairman of a war bonds committee on which Ives served, and he "scorned the idea of anything so useless as a $50 bond". Roosevelt changed his mind about small contributions as seen many years later when he endorsed the March of Dimes to combat poliomyelitis.

Personal life

In 1908, he married Harmony Twichell, daughter of Congregational minister Joseph Twichell and his wife, Julia Harmony Cushman.

George Balanchine's Ivesiana

In 1954, several months after the still relatively unknown composer's death, the New York City Ballet premiered Ivesiana, a ballet by George Balanchine to unrelated and contrasting compositions by Ives, including The Unanswered Question and Central Park in the Dark.

In popular culture

Charles Ives and his wife Harmony (née Twichell) Ives were the subjects of the opera Harmony (2021) by Robert Carl and Russell Banks, which was premiered by the Seagle Festival in August 2021. Charles Ives was played by baritone Joel Clemens and Harmony Twichell was played by soprano Victoria Erickson.

My Father Knew Charles Ives is an orchestral triptych by the American composer John Adams. The piece was commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony under conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, and serves as an autobiography and homage to Ives. While Adams's father didn't actually have relation to Ives, the piece finds connection between the lives of Adams and Ives, both of whom grew up in rural New England.