Charles Ives

Charles Edward Ives (October 20, 1874–May 19, 1954) was an American composer of classical music. He is widely regarded as one of the first American classical composers of international significance. Ives's music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Over time, Ives would come to be regarded as one of the "American Originals", a composer working in a uniquely American style, with American folk tunes woven through his music, and a reaching sense of the possibilities in music.

Ives's music

Ives was trained at Yale, and his First Symphony shows a grasp of the academic skills required to write in the Sonata Form of the late 19th century, as well as an iconoclastic streak, with a second theme that implies different harmonic direction. His father was a band leader, and as with Hector Berlioz, Ives had a fascination with outdoor music and with instrumentation. His attempts to fuse these two musical pillars, and his devotion to Beethoven, would set the direction for his musical life.

Related Topics:
Sonata Form - Hector Berlioz

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Ives published a large collection of his songs, many of which had piano parts which echoed modern movements begun in Europe, including bitonality and pantonality. He was an accomplished pianist, capable of improvising in a variety of styles, including those which were then quite new. Although he is now best known for his orchestral music, he composed two string quartets and other works of chamber 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. The piece takes the tune (which is the same one as is used for the national anthem of the United Kingdom) through a series of fairly standard but witty variations. One of the variations is in the style of a flamenco while another, added some years after the piece had originally been composed, is probably Ives's first use of bitonality. William Schuman arranged this for orchestra in 1964.

Related Topics:
Bitonality - Pantonality - Fourth of July - Flamenco - William Schuman

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Ives had composed two symphonies, but it is with The Unanswered Question (1908), written for the highly unusual combination of trumpet, four flutes, and string quartet, that he established the mature sonic world which would be his signature style. The strings (located offstage) play very slow, chorale-like music throughout the piece while on several occasions the trumpet (positioned behind the audience) plays a short motif that Ives described as "the eternal question of existence". Each time the trumpet is answered with a shrill outburst from the flutes (onstage) — apart from the last: the unanswered question. The piece is typical Ives — it juxtaposes various disparate elements, it appears to be driven by a narrative that we are never made fully aware of, and it is tremendously mysterious. He later made an orchestral version that became one of his more popular works.

Related Topics:
Trumpet - Flute - String quartet - Chorale

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Pieces such as The Unanswered Question were almost certainly influenced by the New England transcendentalist writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. These were important influences to Ives, as he acknowledged in his ' (1909–15), which he described as an "impression of the spirit of transcendentalism that is associated in the minds of many with Concord, Mass., of over a half century ago...undertaken in impressionistic pictures of Emerson and Thoreau, a sketch of the Alcotts, and a scherzo supposed to reflect a lighter quality which is often found in the fantastic side of Hawthorne."

Related Topics:
Transcendentalist - Ralph Waldo Emerson - Henry David Thoreau - Alcotts - Scherzo - Hawthorne

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The piece is possibly Ives's best-known piece for solo piano (although it should be noted that there are optional parts for viola and flute). Rhythmically and harmonically, it is typically adventurous, and it demonstrates Ives's fondness for quotation — on several occasions the opening motto from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is quoted. It also contains one of the most striking examples of Ives's experimentalism: in the second movement, he instructs the pianist to use a 14¾ in (37.5 cm) piece of wood to create a massive cluster chord.

Related Topics:
Viola - Beethoven - Fifth Symphony - Cluster chord

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Perhaps the most remarkable piece of orchestral music Ives completed was his Symphony No. 4 (1910–16). The list of forces required to perform the work alone is extraordinary; as well as a large symphony orchestra, the piece requires a massive percussion section, two pianos (one tuned a quarter tone apart from the other), an organ, an extra group of distant strings, a full chorus, three optional saxophones, and finally an "ether organ" (it is not clear what Ives meant by this, but a theremin or a synthesizer is usually used). The program of the work echoes that of The Unanswered Question — Ives said the piece was "a searching question of 'What' and 'Why' which the spirit of man asks of life". Use of quotation is again rife, especially in the first movement, and there is no shortage of novel effects. In the second movement, for example, a tremolando is heard througout the entire orchestra. In the final movement, there is a sort of musical fight between discordant sounds and more traditional tonal music. Eventually a wordless chorus enters, the mood becomes calmer, and the piece ends quietly with just the percussion playing.

Related Topics:
Orchestra - Percussion - Quarter tone - Organ - Saxophone - Theremin - Synthesizer - Tremolando

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The symphony did not have a complete performance until 1965, almost 50 years after the completion of the work, and 11 years after the composer's death.

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Ives left behind material for an unfinished Universe Symphony, which he was unable to assemble in his lifetime despite two decades of work. This was due to his health problems as well as his shifting conception of the work. There have been several attempts at completion or performing version. However, none has found its way into general performance. The symphony takes the ideas in the Symphony No. 4 to an even higher level, with complex cross rhythms and difficult layered dissonance along with unusual instrumental combinations.

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Ives's chamber works include the String Quartet No. 2, where the parts are often written at extremes of counterpoint, ranging from spiky dissonance in the movement labelled "Arguments" to transcendentally slow. This range of extremes is frequent in Ives's music — crushing blare and dissonance contrasted with lyrical quiet — and carried out by the relationship of the parts slipping in and out of phase with each other. Ives's idiom, like Mahler's, employed highly independent melodic lines. It is regarded as difficult to play because many of the typical signposts for performers are not present. This work had a clear influence on Elliott Carter's First Quartet, among others.

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