CharlesIves

George Ives played his cornet across a pond so that his son could hear what distance did to the sound. He made the boy sing in one key while he accompanied in another, built instruments that could play quarter-tones and tried out the collision of two marching bands. A former Union Army bandmaster, he earned his living teaching and directing music in Danbury, Connecticut, where his son Charles was born in 1874.

The lessons also involved work. By fourteen Charles was a salaried church organist; at seventeen he wrote the Variations on America, a set of variations for keyboard on the tune of God Save the King. At Yale, which he entered in 1894, Horatio Parker taught him counterpoint, orchestration and the construction of a symphony. His First Symphony, written in a European idiom, came out of that teaching. George died of a stroke during Charles’s first term.

1898–⁠1908Mutual Life Insurance and New York

After graduation Ives went to New York and took a fifteen-dollar-a-week job at the Mutual Life Insurance Company. He went on playing the organ in church until 1902, when he resigned his last post. With Julian Myrick he built an insurance agency that made enough money to pay for copyists, printed scores and concerts of other composers’ music. He composed in the evenings, at weekends and on holidays.

His Second Symphony brought American songs into the forms Parker had taught him. The Third, The Camp Meeting, drew on the hymns he had played in church. In some movements a tune is not heard whole until near the end. Fragments of it appear in separate instruments, grow louder and fuller, and finally join up. In Ives the point at which the complete tune is heard can be the climax of the movement.

1908–⁠17Marriage and Three Places in New England

In June 1908 Ives married Harmony Twichell, a settlement-house nurse and the daughter of a minister. On their honeymoon they walked beside the Housatonic River at Stockbridge and heard singing from a church across the water. In The Housatonic at Stockbridge, restless strings surround a hymn-like tune. Charles and Harmony later adopted a daughter, Edith. In the same years Ives wrote the Holidays Symphony, the Second String Quartet, much of the Fourth Symphony and the Concord Sonata.

The Housatonic piece ends Three Places in New England. Its first movement stands before Saint-⁠Gaudens’s monument in Boston to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the Black soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. Marching songs pass slowly through the orchestra at a low dynamic. Between these two slow movements comes Putnam’s Camp, which depicts a Fourth of July picnic, a child wandering into the woods, a vision of Revolutionary soldiers and a return to the games. The band falls out of step.

Decoration Day, from the Holidays Symphony, depicts another Danbury ceremony. George’s band led the town to the cemetery, he played Taps over the graves, and the band came home to a brisker tune. Ives kept fragments of the slow music sounding around the march.

ConcordThe Concord Sonata

Then comes Thoreau. Near the end an optional flute joins the piano, the instrument the writer played at Walden. Beneath it, the piano returns to a small repeating figure. Ives printed the score at his own expense in 1920 and mailed copies the following January, together with a book of essays explaining his literary companions.

These prefatory essays were written by the composer for those who can’t stand his music—and the music for those who can’t stand his essays.

The Fourth Symphony needs larger forces than the earlier symphonies. A chorus sings Watchman, tell us of the night in the opening movement. The second movement sets hymns and marching music against each other at different speeds, and the third is a fugue. In the finale the percussion plays in its own tempo beneath the orchestra, and Nearer, My God, to Thee returns. Performances have sometimes used more than one conductor to keep the independent tempos together.

1918–⁠65Illness, revisions and first performances

Henry Cowell championed him; Nicolas Slonimsky took Three Places to Europe. John Kirkpatrick gave the complete public première of Concord at New York’s Town Hall in 1939, from memory. Lou Harrison conducted the Third Symphony in 1946; it won the Pulitzer Prize the next year. Bernstein introduced the Second in 1951. Ives died in 1954. The Fourth was first performed complete in 1965, when Leopold Stokowski and two assisting conductors brought it to Carnegie Hall.