Charles Ives

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 • Hallowe'en for string quartet, piano, & bass drum, Kw11 • Piano Trio (c. 1909–10, rev. c. 1914–15) • Violin Sonata No. 1 (1910–14; rev. c. 1924) • Violin Sonata No. 4, Children's Day at the Camp Meeting (1911–16) • A Symphony: New England Holidays (1904–13) • "Robert Browning" Overture (1911–14) • Symphony No. 4 (1912–18; rev. 1924–26) • String Quartet No. 2 (1913–15) • Pieces for chamber ensemble grouped as "Sets", some called Cartoons or Take-Offs or Songs Without Voices (1906–18); includes Calcium Light Night • Three Places in New England (Orchestral Set No. 1) (1910–14; rev. 1929) • Violin Sonata No. 2 (1914–17) • Violin Sonata No. 3 (1914–17) • Orchestral Set No. 2 (1915–19) • Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840–60 (1916–19) (more commonly known as the Concord Sonata and revised many times by Ives) • Universe Symphony (incomplete, 1915–28, worked on symphony until his death in 1954) • 114 Songs (composed various years 1887–1921, published 1922.) • Three Quarter Tone Piano Pieces (1923–24) • Orchestral Set No. 3 (incomplete, 1919–26, notes added after 1934)

• Illustration — Charles Ives House in Danbury, Connecticut 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". At this time, Ives was also promoted by Bernard Herrmann, who worked as a conductor at CBS and in 1940 became principal conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra. While there, he championed Ives's music. When they met, Herrmann confessed that he had tried his hand at performing the Concord Sonata. Ives, who avoided the radio and the phonograph, agreed to make a series of piano recordings from 1933 to 1943. One of the more unusual recordings, made in New York City in 1943, features Ives playing the piano and singing the words to his popular World War I song "They Are There!", which he composed in 1917. He revised it in 1942–43 for World War II. Ives's piano recordings were later issued in 1974 by Columbia Records on a special LP set for his centenary. New World Records issued 42 tracks of his recordings on CD on April 1, 2006, as Ives Plays Ives. In Canada in the 1950s, the expatriate English pianist Lloyd Powell played a series of concerts including all of Ives's piano works, at the University of British Columbia. • Illustration — Ives in 1913 Recognition of Ives's music steadily increased. He received praise from Arnold Schoenberg, who regarded him as a monument to artistic integrity, and from the New York School of William Schuman. Shortly after Schoenberg's death (three years before Ives died), his widow found a note written by her husband. The note had originally been written in 1944 when Schoenberg was living in Los Angeles and teaching at UCLA. It said: "There is a great Man living in this Country – a composer. He has solved the problem how to preserve one's self-esteem and to learn. He responds to negligence by contempt. He is not forced to accept praise or blame. His name is Ives." In 1951, Leonard Bernstein conducted the world premiere of Ives's Symphony No. 2 in a broadcast concert by the New York Philharmonic. The Iveses heard the performance on their cook's radio and were amazed at the audience's warm reception to the music. Bernstein continued to conduct Ives's music and made a number of recordings with the Philharmonic for Columbia Records. He honored Ives on one of his televised youth concerts and in a special disc included with the reissue of the 1960 recording of the second symphony and the "Fourth of July" movement from Ives's Holiday Symphony. Another pioneering Ives recording, undertaken during the 1950s, was the first complete set of the four violin sonatas, performed by Minneapolis Symphony concertmaster Rafael Druian and John Simms. Leopold Stokowski took on Symphony No. 4 in 1965, regarding the work as "the heart of the Ives problem". The Carnegie Hall world premiere by the American Symphony Orchestra led to the first recording of the music. Another promoter of his was choral conductor Gregg Smith, who made a series of recordings of his shorter works during the 1960s. These included the first stereo recordings of the psalm settings and arrangements of many short pieces for theater orchestra. The Juilliard String Quartet recorded the two string quartets during the 1960s. In the early 21st century, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas is an enthusiastic exponent of Ives's symphonies, as is composer and biographer Jan Swafford. Ives's work is regularly programmed in Europe. He has also inspired pictorial artists, most notably Eduardo Paolozzi, who entitled one of his 1970s sets of prints Calcium Light Night, each print being named for an Ives piece (including Central Park in the Dark). In 1991, Connecticut's legislature designated Ives as that state's official composer. The Scottish baritone Henry Herford began a survey of Ives's songs in 1990, but this remains incomplete. The record company involved (Unicorn-Kanchana) collapsed. Pianist-composer and Wesleyan University professor Neely Bruce has made a life's study of Ives. To date, he has staged seven parts of a concert series devoted to the complete songs of Ives. Musicologist David Gray Porter reconstructed a piano concerto, the "Emerson" Concerto, from Ives's sketches. A recording of the work was released by Naxos Records. American singer and composer Frank Zappa included Charles Ives in a list of influences that he presented in the liner notes of his debut album Freak Out! (1966). Ives continues to influence contemporary composers, arrangers and musicians. Planet Arts Records released Mists: Charles Ives for Jazz Orchestra. Ives befriended and encouraged a young Elliott Carter. In addition, Phil Lesh, bassist of the Grateful Dead, described Ives as one of his two musical heroes. Jazz musician Albert Ayler also named Charles Ives as an influence in a 1970 interview with Swing Journal. American microtonal musician and composer Johnny Reinhard reconstructed and performed Universe symphony in 1996. The Unanswered Ives is an hour-long film documentary directed by Anne-Kathrin Peitz and produced by Accentus Music (Leipzig, Germany). This was released in 2018 and shown on Swedish and German television stations; it features interviews with Jan Swafford, John Adams, James Sinclair and Jack Cooper. In 1965, Ives won a Grammy Award for his composition Symphony No. 4 and the American Symphony Orchestra won for their recording of the work. Ives had previously been nominated in 1964 for "New England Holidays" and in 1960 for Symphony No. 2. Igor Stravinsky praised Ives. In 1966 he said: "[Ives] was exploring the 1960s during the heyday of Strauss and Debussy. Polytonality; atonality; tone clusters; perspectivistic effects; chance; statistical composition; permutation; add-a-part, practical-joke, and improvisatory music: these were Ives’s discoveries a half-century ago as he quietly set about devouring the contemporary cake before the rest of us even found a seat at the same table." John Cage expressed his admiration for Ives in "Two Statements on Ives", writing "I think that Ives's relevance increases as time goes on" and stating that "his contribution to American music was in every sense 'not only spiritual, by also concretely musical.' Nowadays everything I hear by Ives delights me." Cage recalled that during the 1930s, he was "not interested in Ives because of the inclusion in his music of aspects of American folk and popular material". but that once he began to focus on indeterminacy, he "was able to approach Ives in an entirely different... spirit." Cage noted that Ives "knew that if sound sources came from different points in space that that fact was in itself interesting. Nobody before him had thought about this..." and stated that "the freedom that he gave to a performer saying Do this or do that according to your choice is directly in line with present indeterminate music." Cage also expressed his interest in what he called the "mud of Ives", by which he meant "the part that is not referential..." from which arises a "complex superimposition [of] lines that makes a web in which we cannot clearly perceive anything..." leading to "the possibility of not knowing what's happening..." Cage wrote that "more and more... I think this experience of non-knowledge is more useful and more important to us than the Renaissance notion of knowing A B C D E F..." Cage also praised Ives's "understanding... of inactivity and of silence..." and recalled having read an essay in which: In the summer of 2019, the Charles Ives Music Festival was established in Fairfield County, Connecticut. The festival is an annual event with a focus on classical music, chamber concerts, and educational programs, as well as an affiliation with the Western Connecticut Youth Orchestra. Concerts primarily feature the music and honor the legacy of Ives. Conductor Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic won a Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance for Ives's Complete Symphonies (Deutsche Grammophon, recorded in 2020). There is evidence that Ives backdated his scores to sound more modern than he really was. This was first proposed by Maynard Solomon, an advocate of Ives's music. This has, in turn, generated some controversy and puzzlement.