Born on October 20, 1874 in Danbury,
Connecticut, Charles Ives’ childhood was greatly influenced by his father, who
was the leader of the local band. His love for experimenting with acoustics,
dissonance and happenstance could explain the combination of new and old, of
common and extreme, so obvious in the son’s compositions.
The graduation from Yale put the
young Ives in a difficult position. Because earning a living out of music would
have meant giving up his principles and composing music in tone with the
tendencies of the time, he preferred to keep music as a hobby and work as a
clerk.
He worked his way up in the business
world and could have retired with a fortune, but he chose to live humbly and
strive to answer the life insurance needs of the working class. Few would have
believed that, beyond the fame he earned as an innovator in sales training and
estate planning, he was a passionate composer.
The evenings and weekends he
dedicated to music gave life to an impressive portfolio of compositions striking
with atonality, linear structures and complex rhythms and anticipating devices currently
considered as the 20th century music’s leading edge.
He never sought fame or recognition
for his music, his explanation being: "I
felt I could work better and liked to work better if I kept to my own
music and let other people keep to theirs". In his opinion, good music
could only come from people who would not make a living out of it and
performances were undesirable, as "the more a composer accepts from his
patron, the less he will accept from himself".
He insisted that his music should be
available to anyone and not subject to copyright, scaring off publishers with
requests that free copies be made available upon request. He issued two works at
his own expense, a songs collection and the "Concord" Piano Sonata, giving the copies away.
Perhaps Ives' most accessible composition
is Symphony # 2, a fluent blend of elements borrowed from Brahms and
Wagner, performed for the first time almost half a century later, in 1951, by
the New York Philharmonic led by Leonard Bernstein. It was recorded in 1958 and
followed by the 1965 recorded performance of the Symphony # 3.
Symphony #4 had its
premiere in 1965, with the majestic performance of the American Symphony Orchestra led by Leopold Stokowski. The
spirit of the young Ives was captured in Holidays, recollecting Washington's
Birthday, the Fourth of July the Decoration Day and Thanksgiving and bursting
with moody impressionism, parades, barn dances and fireworks.
Three Places in New England, on the other hand, mingles Ives’
personal reflections with his Yankee pride with deeply personal reflection. The
Unanswered Question never got the recognition it deserved, being often
CD filler material, but it could be the composer’s masterpiece. In it, he
managed to deeply and elegantly analyze the human condition in only 5 1/2
minutes.
The Quartets and the Sonatas
for Violin and Piano are the composer’s thoughtful contribution to chamber
music, his creative impulses culminating with the revised version of the "Concord"
Piano Sonata. Charles Ives supported his works
with writings as well: the informative scraps collected in Memos and Essays Before
a Sonata.
He had a stroke and died on 19th
May, 1954, the royalties from his music being bequeathed by
his widow to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for the
founding of the Charles
Ives Prize.
