Musicians - Charles Ives

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	Musicians - 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.

Biography

Charles was born in Danbury, Connecticut, the son of George Ives, a U.S. Army bandleader in the American Civil War, and his wife Mollie. A strong influence of Charles's may have been sitting in the Danbury town square, listening to his father's marching band and other bands on other sides of the square simultaneously. George Ives's unique music lessons were also a strong influence on Charles; George Ives took an open-minded approach to musical theory, encouraging his son to experiment in bitonal and polytonal harmonizations. Charles would often sing a song in one key, while his father accompanied in another key. It was from his father that Charles Ives also learned the music of Stephen Foster. Ives became a church organist at the age of 14 and wrote various hymns and songs for church services, including his Variations on 'America' .

Ives moved to New Haven in 1893, graduating from the Hopkins School. Then, in September 1894, Ives went to 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 Charles's father died, a crushing blow to the young composer, who idealized his father, and to a large degree continued the musical experimentation begun by him. His works Calcium Light Night and Yale-Princeton Football Game show the influence of college on Ives's composition. He wrote his Symphony No. 1 as his senior thesis under Parker's supervision. 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.

Ives died in 1954 in New York City.

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.

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 polonaise 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.

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.

Pieces such as The Unanswered Question were almost certainly influenced by the New England transcendentalist writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. 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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Musicians - Charles Ives

Biography

Ives's music

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