Ives, Charles (Edward)

(b Danbury, CT, 20 Oct 1874; d New York, 19 May 1954). American composer. His music is marked by an integration of American and European musical traditions, innovations in rhythm, harmony and form, and an unparalleled ability to evoke the sounds and feelings of American life. He is regarded as the leading American composer of art music of the 20th century.

1. Unusual aspects of Ives’s career.

2. Youth, 1874–94.

3. Apprenticeship, 1894–1902.

4. Innovation and synthesis, 1902–8.

5. Maturity, 1908–18.

6. Last works, 1918–1927.

7. Revisions and premières, 1927–54.

WORKS

WRITINGS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. PETER BURKHOLDER (work-list with JAMES B. SINCLAIR and GAYLE SHERWOOD)

Ives, Charles

1. Unusual aspects of Ives’s career.

Ives had an extraordinary working life. After professional training as an organist and composer, he worked in insurance for 30 years, composing in his free time. He used a wide variety of styles, from tonal Romanticism to radical experimentation, even in pieces written during the same period. His major works often took years from first sketch to final revisions, and most pieces lay unperformed for decades. His self-publications in the early 1920s brought a small group of admirers who worked to promote his music. He soon ceased to compose new works, focussing instead on revising and preparing for performance the works he had already drafted. By his death he had received many performances and honours, and much of his music had been published. His reputation continued to grow posthumously, and by his centenary in 1974 he was recognized worldwide as the first composer to create a distinctively American art music. Since then his music has been frequently performed and recorded and his reputation has broadened further, resting less on his innovations and nationality and more on the intrinsic merits of his music.

The unique circumstances of Ives’s career have bred misunderstandings. His work in insurance, combined with the diversity of his output and the small number of performances during his composing years, led to an image of Ives as an amateur. Yet he had a 14-year career as a professional organist and thorough formal training in composition. Since he developed as a composer out of the public eye, his mature works seemed radical and unconnected to the past when they were first published and performed. However, as his earlier music has become known, his deep roots in 19th-century European Romanticism and his gradual development of a highly personal modern idiom have become clear. The first of Ives’s major works to appear in performance and publication, such as Orchestral Set no.1: Three Places in New England, the Concord Sonata, and movements of the Symphony no.4 and A Symphony: New England Holidays, were highly complex, incorporated diverse musical styles and made frequent use of musical borrowing. These characteristics led some to conclude that Ives’s music could be understood only through the programmatic explanations he offered and was not organized on specifically musical principles. Yet by tracing the evolution of his techniques through his earlier works, scholars have demonstrated the craft that underlies even seemingly chaotic scores and have shown the close relationship of his procedures to those of his European predecessors and contemporaries.

One result of Ives’s unusual path is that the chronology of his music is difficult to establish beyond general outlines. His practice of composing and reworking pieces over many years often makes it impossible to assign a piece a single date. That he worked on many compositions and in many idioms simultaneously makes the chronological relationships between works still more complex. There is often no independent verification of the dates Ives assigned to his works, which can be years or decades before the first performance or publication. It has been suggested, too, that he dated many pieces too early and concealed significant revisions in order to claim priority over European composers who used similar techniques (Solomon, C1987) or to hide from his business associates how much time he was spending on music in the 1920s (Swafford, C1996). Recent scholarship, however, has established firmer dates for the types of music paper Ives used and refined estimated dates for various forms of his handwriting, allowing most manuscripts to be placed within a brief span of years (Sherwood, C1994 and E1995, building on Kirkpatrick, A1960, and Baron, C1990). These methods have often come to support Ives’s dates, confirming that he did indeed develop numerous innovative techniques before his European counterparts, including polytonality, tone-clusters, chords based on 4ths or 5ths, atonality and polyrhythm. Where a discrepancy exists – in the case of several longer works for example – this may well result from his practice of dating pieces by their initial conception, the first ideas worked out at the keyboard or in sketches now lost. The dates provided here are, then, estimates based on the manuscripts when extant, supplemented by contemporary documents and Ives’s testimony.

Ives, Charles

2. Youth, 1874–94.

The Iveses were one of Danbury’s leading families, prominent in business and civic improvement and active in social causes, such as the abolition of slavery. Ives’s father George E. Ives (1845–94) was exceptional in making music a career. He took lessons in the flute, violin, piano and cornet, following which, during 1860–62, he studied harmony, counterpoint and orchestration with the German-born musician Carl Foeppl in New York. After Civil War service as the youngest bandmaster in the Union Army and two more years in New York, he returned to Danbury and pursued a variety of musical activities, performing, teaching and leading bands, orchestras and choirs in and near Danbury, and sometimes touring with travelling shows. He also worked in businesses connected to the Ives family. He married Mary (‘Mollie’) Elizabeth Parmalee (1849–1929) on 1 January 1874, and Charles was born late the same year, followed by J. Moss (1876–1939), who became a lawyer and judge in Danbury.

Through his father, Ives was exposed to the entire range of music-making in Danbury. He studied the piano and organ from a young age with a series of teachers and was playing in recitals by his early teens. He became an accomplished performer and composer in two musical traditions, American vernacular music and Protestant church music, and gained his first exposure to a third, European classical music. Additionally, he was an avid athlete and was captain of several baseball and football teams. Ives played the drums with his father’s band, and the spirit of band performance echoes in many works of his maturity. He wrote marches for piano, band and theatre orchestra, several of which adopt the then common practice of setting a popular song in one section of the march. His first publicly performed piece may have been the march Holiday Quickstep, written when he was 13; the review in the Danbury Evening News of the January 1888 première called him ‘certainly a musical genius’ and declared ‘we shall expect more from this talented youngster in the future’.

At the age of 14 he became the youngest salaried church organist in the state, and he worked regularly as one until 1902. He wrote anthems and sacred songs for church services, at first using hymn texts and a hymn-like style (as in Psalm 42), and then from about 1893 (in works such as Crossing the Bar) adopting the more elaborate and chromatic style of Dudley Buck, with whom he briefly studied the organ around 1895. The hymns he knew from church and from camp-meeting revivals, where his father sometimes led the singing with his cornet, he later regularly borrowed or reworked as themes in sonatas, quartets and symphonies. He heard some classical music in concert performances in both Danbury and New York and learnt rather more through his own study and performance of works by Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Rossini, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Wagner, John Knowles Paine and others on the piano or organ, including many transcriptions. His virtuoso Variations on ‘America’ (1891–2) shows just how skilled an organist Ives was while still in his late teens.

Although he had many teachers for performance, his father taught him harmony and counterpoint and guided his first compositions. Several of these take existing works as models, following the traditional practice of learning through imitation, such as the Polonaise for two cornets and piano (c1887–9), modelled on the sextet from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. At the same time, Ives’s father had an open mind about musical theory and practice and encouraged his son’s experimentation. Bitonal harmonizations of London Bridge, polytonal canons and fugues, and experiments with whole-tone pieces, triads in parallel motion and chromatic lines moving in contrary motion to create expanding or contracting wedges, all dating from the early 1890s, show Ives’s interest in testing the rules of traditional music by trying out alternative systems. At the time, however, Ives apparently conceived of this merely as playing with music theory, a private activity shared primarily with his father, rather than regarding these new systems as a serious basis for composing concert music. On still another musical plane, it was his father whom he credited with teaching him the songs of Stephen Foster, whose tunes he would later borrow and whose simple diatonic lyricism informs many of Ives’s own melodies.

Ives moved to New Haven in early 1893 to attend Hopkins Grammar School and prepare for entrance examinations at Yale (fig.1). He was the organist at St Thomas’s Episcopal Church for a year, and then moved to Center Church on the Green in September 1894, the same month he matriculated at Yale. Just six weeks later, on 4 November, his father died suddenly of a stroke. Leaving home, starting university, and especially the death of his principal teacher and supporter marked a sharp break from the past and the end of his youth.

Ives, Charles

3. Apprenticeship, 1894–1902.

Ives began his time at Yale as a virtuoso organist and an experienced composer of popular and church music but with limited exposure to classical music. He continued to compose vernacular works including songs, marches, and glee club and fraternity-show numbers. Several works were published, including an 1896 campaign song for William McKinley. His church music also grew in maturity, as he gradually adopted the elevated choral style of his teacher at Yale, Horatio Parker, in works such as All-Forgiving, look on me. The choirmaster at Center Church, John Cornelius Griggs, became a supportive colleague and lifelong friend. But it was in classical music that he learnt the most. For the first time, he had regular access to chamber and orchestral concerts. He apparently audited Parker’s courses in harmony and music history during his first two years, and then studied counterpoint, strict composition and instrumentation, sometimes as the only registered student. Comparison of his earlier exercises with the works of his last term shows how much he learnt from Parker. Like Ives’s father, Parker encouraged mastering styles and genres through imitation. Ives assimilated the German lied by resetting texts from well-known examples, typically incorporating some aspects of the model’s structure or contour while seeking a different figuration and mood. He later recalled that his Feldeinsamkeit (c1897–8) earned the praise of Parker’s teacher George Chadwick for taking ‘a more difficult and almost opposite approach’ that was ‘in its way almost as good as Brahms’ and ‘as good a song as [Parker] could write’.

Ives began his Symphony no.1 under Parker, and later recalled that the second and fourth movements were accepted as his final thesis. In this work there are strong echoes of the symphonic masterpieces he used as models, especially Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ in the first movement, Dvořák’s ‘New World’ in the slow movement and the work as a whole, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the scherzo, and Tchaikovsky’s ‘Pathétique’ in the finale, yet even the most direct references are reworked in fresh and interesting ways. Ives owed to Parker his new-found skills in counterpoint, thematic development, orchestration and composing large forms, along with the concept, foreign to the utilitarian music of Danbury, of music as an experience to be savoured for its own sake. The simultaneous citation of the familiar and assertion of an individual personality is a distinguishing Ives trait, evident even in the music he wrote in a late-Romantic style. This work also set the pattern for Ives’s later symphonies and for many of his sonatas in linking movements through the cyclic repetition of themes.

Although he studied music diligently, Ives may not have intended to make music his career. He took the usual round of Greek, Latin, German, French, mathematics, history and political science, and remembered especially fondly his English and American literature courses with William Lyon Phelps, who helped to form Ives’s taste in poetry. A Yale education was seen as a preparation for success in business, and much of the social life on the all-male campus was organized around groups through which one could develop friendships and potentially useful connections. Ives was no great scholar outside his music courses, but he was well-regarded and socially successful, chosen as a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and of Wolf’s Head, one of the most prestigious of Yale’s secret senior societies. Songs of both groups figure in later works recalling his college days, such as in Calcium Light Night and the middle movement of the Trio for Violin, Violoncello and Piano. One of his best friends was David Twichell, who invited him to Keene Valley in the Adirondacks for a family vacation in August 1896; there Ives met his future wife, David’s sister Harmony (1876–1969). After graduation in 1898, he moved to New York, living for the next decade in a series of apartments, all wryly dubbed Poverty Flat, with other bachelors with Yale connections. Through his father’s cousin, Ives gained a position in the actuarial department of the Mutual Insurance Company. In early 1899 he moved to Charles H. Raymond and Co., agents for Mutual, where he worked with sales agents and developed ways to present the idea of insurance. There he met Julian Myrick (1880–1969), who would later become his partner.

While working in insurance, Ives did not give up all hope of a musical career. He continued to serve as an organist, first in Bloomfield, New Jersey (where for the first time he was also choirmaster), and then from 1900 at the Central Presbyterian Church in New York, a prestigious post. After university, he ceased writing vernacular music and sought to consolidate his training as a composer of art music in the Parker mould. He continued to write lieder to established texts and composed a seven-movement cantata, The Celestial Country, modelled on Parker’s oratorio Hora novissima, whose 1893 première had established Parker’s reputation.

He also pursued some new avenues. Parker had focussed on German music; now Ives wrote French chansons, modelled on those of composers such as Massenet. He reworked some of the German songs with new English texts; it would become characteristic of him to reshape older pieces into newer ones, often in different media. In similar fashion, he developed what may have been church service music from his Yale years into a string quartet that used paraphrased hymn tunes as themes. The opening theme of the First Symphony had used elements of two hymns, but the String Quartet no.1 established the pattern for many later works in that it grew completely out of music he had written for the church, and derived virtually every one of its themes from a hymn tune source. Unaltered hymn tunes were too predictable and repetitive in rhythm, melody and harmony to serve well as themes for movements in classical forms, so Ives ingeniously reshaped them into irregular, Brahmsian themes ripe for development, while preserving a hymn-like, American character. Ex.1 shows the derivation of the opening theme of the third movement from its source, the hymn-tune Nettleton (‘Come, Thou Fount of Ev’ry Blessing’). With this work Ives began to integrate the different traditions he had learnt, bringing the spirit and sound of Protestant hymnody into the realm of art music.

Most remarkably, Ives’s experimentation took on a new seriousness. Armed with techniques learnt from Parker and perhaps inspired by the compositional systems of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that Parker described in his music history lectures, such as organum, counterpoint and rhythmic stratification (Scott, 1994), Ives began to produce, not mere sketches or improvised ‘stunts’, but finished pieces that explore new procedures. Most significant is a series of sacred choral works, mainly psalm-settings, that Ives may have tried out with singers where he was organist, although no performances are registered. Psalm 67 uses transformations of a five-note chord (arranged to create the impression of bitonality) to harmonize a simple melody in a style resembling Anglican chant. Psalm 150 features parallel triads that are dissonant against sustained triads. Psalm 25 deploys angular, dissonant two-voice canons over pedal points and includes a whole-tone passage that expands from a unison to a whole-tone cluster spanning almost three octaves. In Psalm 24 the outer voices move in contrary motion, expanding from a unison in each successive phrase and moving first by semitones (often displaced by octaves), then by whole tones, 3rds, 4ths, 4ths and tritones, and finally 5ths; after the golden section of the work, there is a contraction, phrase by phrase, using the same intervals in reverse order, to make an approximate palindrome.

Each piece finds new ways to establish a tonal centre, create harmonic motion and resolution, and regulate counterpoint. The technique chosen often responds to the text; for example, the central image of Processional: Let There Be Light is perfectly conveyed by the procession of chords formed of 2nds, 3rds, 4ths and 5ths, through increasingly dissonant chords of 6ths and 7ths, to pure octaves. In these systematic experiments in compositional method, Ives established what was to become a 20th-century tradition of experimental composition, one that included the work of Cowell, Charles Seeger, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Cage, and many later composers. These experimental works remained distinct from his concert music, which continued to use the language of European Romanticism.

The climax of Ives’s apprenticeship was the première of The Celestial Country at the Central Presbyterian Church in April 1902, his most ambitious piece to be performed up to that point. It received pleasant, if mild, reviews from the New York Times and Musical Courier. Yet soon after, Ives resigned as organist, the last professional position in music he was to hold. He left behind much of his church music, later discarded by the church, so that what survives of his anthems, songs and organ music for services is only part of what may have been a much larger body of work. Ives apparently concluded that he did not want or would not achieve a career like that of Parker, who survived as a composer by serving as a church organist and teaching at Yale. He would later ironically describe this as the time he ‘resigned as a nice organist and gave up music’.

Ives, Charles

4. Innovation and synthesis, 1902–8.

Leaving his church position freed evenings and weekends for composition, and forgoing regular performance allowed Ives freedom to explore without having to please anyone but himself. No longer a Parker apprentice, nor a composer of popular or sacred music, Ives entered a period of innovation and synthesis.

He continued experimenting, especially now in chamber music, whose greater range of sonorities allowed him to extend traditional counterpoint and increase the independence between the parts to create an effect of separate layers. Works such as the Fugue in Four Keys on ‘The Shining Shore’, From the Steeples and the Mountains, Largo risoluto nos.1 and 2, and The Unanswered Question display polytonal and atonal canons, multiple layers distinguished by rhythm, pitch content and sonority, and the combination of atonal and tonal planes, often with a programme to explain the unusual musical procedures. For example, Scherzo: All the Way Around and Back gradually builds up six distinct layers, subdividing each bar into 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11 equal divisions respectively, over which a bugle plays fanfares in common time (ex.2); the piece is palindromic, swelling to a climax and returning in an exact retrograde, a musical analogue to ‘a foul ball [in baseball] – and the base runner on 3rd has to go all the way back to 1st’.

Ives now sought increasingly to integrate vernacular and church style into his concert music. In his Second Symphony, the major work of this period, he introduced for the first time both hymn tunes and American popular songs into a piece in the classical tradition. The framework is still European, a cyclic five-movement symphony in late Romantic style with direct borrowings from Bach, Brahms, Wagner, Dvořák and Tchaikovsky; the final two movements are modelled on the finale of Brahms’s First Symphony. But the themes are all paraphrased from American melodies, including hymns, fiddle tunes and Stephen Foster songs, reshaped to suit sonata and ternary forms. Like many symphonies which employ national material, the work celebrates the nation’s music while conforming to an international style. In other pieces, such as the improvisations and sketches that became the Ragtime Dances, Ives began to evolve a more modern and individual idiom that drew on American melodic and rhythmic characteristics, including ragtime, the currently popular style. The many guises the Ragtime Dances would eventually assume – from a set of dances for theatre orchestra to movements in his Piano Sonata no.1, Set for Theatre Orchestra and Orchestral Set no.2, and passages in his second Quarter-Tone Piece for two pianos – illustrate again his penchant for reworking his own music into new forms.

Having abandoned music as a career, Ives cast his lot with insurance. However, in 1905 the New York state legislature launched an investigation of scandals in the insurance business, with Mutual and the Raymond agency as particular targets. Although Ives was not implicated, higher executives were, and the agency was ultimately dissolved. The investigation coincided with two bouts of illness or exhaustion for Ives, in the summer of 1905 and late 1906, possibly the first signs of the diabetes that would later afflict him. While recuperating over Christmas 1906 at Old Point Comfort, Virginia, he finalized plans with Myrick to launch an agency affiliated with Washington Life, which had begun as a Mutual subsidiary; it appears that Mutual’s management helped with the arrangements. The ideals Ives stated and pursued as a businessman were, ironically, those articulated at the hearings by the president of Mutual: that life insurance was not a scheme for profit, but a way for each policyholder to provide for his family while ‘participating in a great movement for the benefit of humanity at large’ through mutual assistance. Ives & Co. opened on 1 January 1907, with Myrick as Ives’s assistant.

The year 1905 also began changes in Ives’s personal life, as he renewed his acquaintance with Harmony Twichell, now a registered nurse. Their courtship was slow, hindered by long absences, infrequent times together, and Ives’s shyness. She wrote poems, some of which he set to music in a tonal, Romantic style meant to please her and her family, and they planned an opera that never materialized. Their friendship grew in intensity until they professed their love for each other on 22 October 1907. They were married on 9 June 1908 by Harmony’s father, the Rev. Joseph Twichell, at his Congregational church in Hartford, and settled in New York.

Ives, Charles

5. Maturity, 1908–18.

Harmony played a crucial role in Ives’s development. As he noted in his Memos, her unwavering faith in him gave him confidence to be himself, although she did not claim to understand all of his music. Moreover, she helped him to find the purpose and the subject matter for his mature work. She wrote to him in early 1908 stating that

inspiration ought to come fullest at one’s happiest moments – I think it would be so satisfying to crystallize one of those moments at the time in some beautiful expression – but I don’t believe it’s often done – I think inspiration – in art – seems to be almost a consolation in hours of sadness or loneliness & that most happy moments are put into expression after they have been memories & made doubly precious because they are gone.

This upholds the Romantic idea of music as an embodiment of individual emotional experience, but adds two elements that were to become characteristic of Ives’s mature music: capturing specific moments that are individual and irreplaceable, and doing so through memory. Her interest in Ives’s father and family revived his own, and several pieces over the next decade recall the town band (Decoration Day, The Fourth of July, Putnam’s Camp), the American Civil War (The ‘St Gaudens’ in Boston Common), camp meetings (Symphony no.3, Violin Sonata no.4, The Rockstrewn Hills Join in the People’s Outdoor Meeting), and other memories Ives connected to his father. Harmony’s interest in literature rekindled his, which had apparently lain dormant since college, and he produced a series of works on Emerson, Browning, Hawthorne, Thoreau and others. Her sense of idealism about America echoed in him, stimulating a rush of pieces on American subjects. The socially committed Christianity of the Twichells reinforced that of the Ives family, as Ives took up subjects from Matthew Arnold’s West London to the movement to abolish slavery (Study no.9: the Anti-Abolitionist Riots in the 1830s and 40s).

Ives’s successes in insurance must also have bolstered his self-confidence. After Washington Life was sold in 1908, he took Myrick into full partnership in an agency with Mutual, launched on 1 January 1909. Within a few years, they were selling more insurance than any agency in the country, during a time of dramatic expansion in the industry. Their secret lay in recruiting a wide network of agents to sell policies for them and in preparing detailed guidelines for selling insurance, summarizing the best arguments to be made. Ives established the first classes for insurance agents at Mutual and helped to devise and promote ‘estate planning’, a method still used to calculate the amount of life insurance one should carry based on expected income and expenses. His pamphlet The Amount to Carry became a classic of its kind. He composed in the evenings, at weekends and on vacations, finding particular inspiration at a weekend cabin on Pine Mountain in Connecticut and during family vacations in the Adirondacks.

Ives continued to use American melodies as themes, but turned from the traditional ternary and sonata forms of the First Quartet and Second Symphony to a new pattern that may be called cumulative form. In the outer movements of the Symphony no.3, most movements of the four violin sonatas and the Piano Sonata no.1, and several other works from c1908–17, the borrowed hymn tune used as a theme appears complete only near the end, usually accompanied by a countermelody (often paraphrased from another hymn). This is preceded by development of both melodies, including a statement of the countermelody alone. The harmony may be dissonant, and the key is often ambiguous until the theme appears, but the music remains essentially tonal. Cumulative form drew on traditional sources, including thematic development and recapitulation; the 19th-century conventions of a large work culminating with a hymn-like theme and of combining themes in counterpoint; and the church organist practice of preceding a hymn with an improvised prelude on motives from the hymn. Indeed, Ives commented that many of these movements developed from organ preludes he had played or improvised in church, all now lost. However, Ives’s synthesis was new. The avoidance of large-scale repetitions, inherent in older forms, allowed him to use hymns essentially unaltered as themes, for the rhythmic and melodic plainness and lack of harmonic contrast that made them unsuitable for the opening theme of a sonata form were perfect for the end of a movement. The process of developing motives and gradually bringing them together in a hymn paralleled, on a purely musical level, the experience Ives remembered of hymn-singing at the camp-meetings of his youth, as individuals joined in a common expression of feeling.

In other works, Ives sought to capture American life, especially American experiences with music, in a more directly programmatic way. The Housatonic at Stockbridge (ex.3) evokes a walk by the river Ives and his wife shared soon after their marriage. The main melody (given to second violas, horn and English horn), harmonized with simple tonal triads (in the lower strings and brass, notated enharmonically), suggests a hymn wafting from the church across the river, while repeating figures in distant tonal and rhythmic regions (upper strings), subtly changing over time, convey a sense of the mists and rippling water. Like this work, most of Ives’s music about life experiences is composed in layers, distinguished by timbre, register, rhythm, pitch content and dynamic level, to create a sense of three-dimensional space and multiple planes of activity; here the earlier experiments in layering bear rich fruit. Central Park in the Dark pictures the noises and music of the city against the background sounds of nature, rendered as a soft series of atonal chords in parallel motion. In From Hanover Square North, background ostinatos represent city noises in New York, over which commuters on a train platform gradually come together to sing a hymn for those lost in the sinking of the Lusitania that morning. When suggesting a memory of his youth, as in Putnam’s Camp, The Fourth of July and Washington’s Birthday, Ives often infused the background with a collage of tunes related by motif or genre to his main theme, evoking the way one memory will summon up others in a stream of consciousness. Songs such as The Last Reader and The Things Our Fathers Loved suggest a similar fount of memory through a patchwork of fragments from songs of the past.

These programmatic pieces and songs mix tonality with atonality, traditional with experimental procedures, direct quotation with paraphrases and original melodies. Having developed an impressive range of tools, Ives used them all in his mature works, choosing whatever was appropriate to fit the image, event or feeling he was attempting to convey. Ives wrote in 1925, ‘why tonality as such should be thrown out for good, I can’t see. Why it should be always present, I can’t see. It depends, it seems to me, a good deal – as clothes depend on the thermometer – on what one is trying to do’. Ives’s willingness to break rules, even his own, for expressive ends places him with the likes of Monteverdi, Mahler, Beethoven, Strauss and Berg as an essentially dramatic and rhetorical composer. Like them he often coordinated diverse styles within a single movement, using the contrasts to delineate sections and create form as well as for emotional effect. Though this eclecticism has been criticized by those who value systems, refinement, and homogeneity more than rhetorical power, many others have found the mix of elements in Ives’s music an apt expression of the heterogeneity of modern, especially American, life.

In 1912 Ives and his wife bought farmland in West Redding, near Danbury, and built a house, soon settling into a pattern of spending May to November in West Redding and the rest of the year in New York. Unable to have children after Harmony miscarried in April 1909 and underwent an emergency hysterectomy, they found a partial outlet for their parental energies in Moss’s six children, often hosting one or two of them for extended periods. They opened a cottage on their property to poor families from the city through the Fresh Air Fund; the second family to visit had a sickly infant daughter, whom they cared for and eventually adopted as Edith Osborne Ives (1914–56).

From time to time Ives sought out performances or at least readings of his music, and this encouraged him to have clean scores and parts copied by a series of professional copyists. Walter Damrosch conducted an informal reading of movements from the First Symphony in March 1910; attempts to interest him in the Second and Third had no result. Periodically, Ives invited professional musicians to his home to try out some of his music; the reactions he recorded in his Memos ranged from incomprehension to apoplectic criticism of its dissonance and complexity. The USA’s entrance into World War I in April 1917 inspired him to write the song In Flanders Fields to a text by a Mutual medical examiner, and Myrick arranged for a performance at a meeting of insurance executives. Later the same month David Talmadge (violin teacher to Ives’s nephew Moss White Ives) and Stuart Ross performed the Third Violin Sonata for an invited audience at Carnegie Chamber Music Hall.

Ives, Charles

6. Last works, 1918–1927.

The war pulled Ives away from composition into work for the Red Cross and Liberty Loan appeals. He even tried to enlist as an ambulance driver in 1918 but he was turned down for health reasons. At a meeting on 1 October 1918, he argued for Liberty bonds in small denominations to allow the public at large to participate; he won his point, but the same night suffered a heart attack, which kept him from work for a year.

Mindful of his mortality, Ives set about finishing and making available the music he had been composing. Two months in early 1919 were spent at Asheville, North Carolina, where he worked on his second piano sonata, subtitled Concord, Mass., 1840–60, with musical impressions of Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau, and an accompanying book of Essays before a Sonata, his most detailed statement of his aesthetics. The importance of transcendentalism in the sonata and essays has obscured other influences, including that of Beethoven, Debussy, Liszt and perhaps Skryabin on the sonata (and on much of Ives’s other music) and that of Romantic aesthetics and liberal Christianity on his philosophy. The famous distinction Ives makes in the essays between ‘substance’ (more-or-less, the spiritual content of a work) and ‘manner’ (the means of its expression) derives largely from a 1912 essay on Debussy by Ives’s friend John C. Griggs. The sonata and the essays were privately printed in 1920–21 and sent free to musicians and critics whom he hoped to interest in his music. Most reviews were mocking, but a perceptive notice by Henry Bellamann praised the sonata’s ‘loftiness of purpose’ and its ‘elevating and greatly beautiful’ moments. Bellamann became Ives’s first advocate, lecturing and writing on his music, and Ives later set two of Bellamann’s poems.

Between 1919 and 1921 Ives gathered most of his songs, including 20 new ones, 20 adapted to new texts, and 36 newly arranged from works for chorus or instruments, into a book of 114 Songs, privately printed in 1922. Many of the songs use words by Ives or by Harmony, while others set a wide range of texts, from the great English and American poets Ives studied with Phelps at Yale to hymns and poems he found in newspapers, or other such sources. The volume encompasses the diversity of Ives’s output, from the vast clusters that open Majority and the quartal chords and whole-tone melody of The Cage to his German lieder and parlour songs from the 1890s. The late songs include a new style for Ives: more restrained, simpler, and with less overt quotation, although still often dissonant and full of contrasts used to delineate phrases and highlight the text. This is illustrated in the song Resolution (ex.4), which features four distinctive figurations in its brief eight measures, each using a different collection of pitches and each subtly linked to images in the text: in a, a pentatonic melody with dotted rhythms recalls American folksong style, associated with rugged strength and the outdoors, while the wide spacing in voice and piano evokes the spaciousness of ‘distant skies’; in b, tonal harmonies and secondary dominants suggest hymnody, representing faith; c mimics the style Ives associated with sentimental parlour songs, with an undulating melody in dotted rhythm over harmonies tinged with chromaticism, while the reiterated chords and emphasis on G create a sense of marking place; d is again diatonic, suggesting Romantic song through a leap and descent; and a returns at the close, as ‘journey’ harks back to ‘walking’.

Once again Ives distributed his publication to musicians and critics, hoping to attract some interest, with little initial success; Sousa found some songs ‘most startling to a man educated by the harmonic methods of our forefathers’, and the Musical Courier called Ives ‘the American Satie, joker par excellence’. Nevertheless, several of the songs were given their premières in recitals in Danbury, New York and New Orleans, between 1922 and 1924. Ives also completed or revised many other works between 1919 and the early 1920s, including the First Piano Sonata, the second violin sonata, and most movements of A Symphony: New England Holidays, Orchestral Set no.1: Three Places in New England, Orchestral Set no.2 and the Symphony no.4 (fig.2). Many of these multi-movement cycles brought together movements first conceived separately, sometimes at different times. The Second Violin Sonata was first performed in 1924 to respectful reviews, but the others had to wait.

In 1923 Ives met E. Robert Schmitz, pianist and head of the Franco-American Musical Society, later renamed Pro-Musica. Schmitz arranged performances of the Three Quarter-Tone Pieces for two pianos in 1925 and of the first two movements of the Fourth Symphony in 1927. The symphony was a summation of all Ives had done, drawing on more than a dozen earlier works and encompassing the range of his techniques from pure tonality to the most rhythmically complex textures any conductor had ever seen. It traces a mystical inner journey: the brief opening movement poses ‘the searching questions of What? and Why? which the spirit of man asks of life’ (in the words of Bellamann’s programme note) by means of a choral setting of the hymn tune ‘Watchman, Tell Us of the Night’; the second movement is a dream-like collage based on Hawthorne’s tale The Celestial Railroad, a satire of the search for an easy way to heaven; the third movement, based on the first movement of the First Quartet, depicts religious ‘formalism and ritualism’ through a tonal fugue on hymn tunes; and after these two false answers to the questioning prelude the finale suggests the truer path through a meditation on Bethany (‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’) in cumulative form. Despite the work’s novelty and complexity, it won encouraging reviews from Olin Downes of the New York Times and Lawrence Gilman of the Herald Tribune, two of the leading critics of the day.

Ives stopped composing by early 1927; as Harmony later told John Kirkpatrick, ‘he came downstairs one day with tears in his eyes and said he couldn’t seem to compose any more – nothing went well – nothing sounded right’. Theories abound for his cessation, from the psychological effects of his double life in business and music to the physical illnesses he continued to endure. He may have exhausted himself from the push to complete the Fourth Symphony and other major works. He had started no new large compositions since an attempt at a third orchestral set in 1919, which remained unfinished. The early 1920s had produced a few songs and his choral masterpiece Psalm 90, essentially rewritten from scratch around 1923. Around the same time he returned to his ambitious Universe Symphony (begun c1915), the capstone of his exploration of systematic methods of composition, which features over 20 wholly independent musical strands, each moving in its own subdivision of a metric unit eight seconds in length. This too would remain unfinished, finally appearing in three separate realizations in the 1990s. His last new work was the song Sunrise in August 1926. He had still received very few performances, and no professional publications since the 1890s. Ives may have followed the same steps as most composers – first conceiving a piece, then drafting, revising, completing and copying it, and seeing it through to performance and publication – but instead of doing this for each piece in a short span of time, he did it for dozens of pieces at once, stretched over decades.

Ives, Charles

7. Revisions and premières, 1927–54.

After years of health problems, eventually diagnosed as diabetes, Ives retired from business on 1 January 1930. His music was written, but its public career was just beginning. After Bellamann and Schmitz, Ives found an ever-increasing series of advocates who promoted and performed his music. Most important was Cowell, whose quarterly New Music printed several Ives works, starting with the second movement of the Fourth Symphony in 1929, and who wrote a series of appreciations of Ives’s music emphasizing its pioneering use of innovative techniques. Cowell’s New Music Society sponsored the première of the First Violin Sonata in San Francisco in 1928. Also at Cowell’s urging, Nicolas Slonimsky approached Ives for a piece for his Boston Chamber Orchestra, and Ives responded by rescoring Three Places in New England, which Slonimsky performed in New York, Boston, Havana and Paris in 1931 to generally favourable reviews. In September, Slonimsky conducted the première of Washington’s Birthday at a New Music Society concert in San Francisco, and the following year he conducted The Fourth of July in Paris, Berlin and Budapest. In May 1932 Hubert Linscott and Aaron Copland presented seven of Ives’s songs at the first Yaddo Festival of Contemporary American Music, and Ives began to be seen as a forerunner of the current generation of American modernists. These seven songs, The Fourth of July, and the Set for Theatre Orchestra were published in 1932, followed by more songs in 1933 and 1935, Three Places in New England in 1935, Washington’s Birthday in 1936 and Psalm 67 in 1939. Numerous songs were given premières in recitals during the 1930s in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Dresden, Vienna, Paris (with Messiaen at the piano) and elsewhere. The January 1939 New York première of the Concord Sonata by John Kirkpatrick (who had played the world première the previous November in Cos Cob, Connecticut) drew high praise from Gilman in the Herald Tribune, who called it ‘exceptionally great music … the greatest music composed by an American, and the most deeply and essentially American in impulse and implication’. More premières followed, including the Fourth Violin Sonata in 1940, the Symphony no.3 and the String Quartet no.2 in 1946, and the Piano Sonata no.1 in 1949, each more than a quarter of a century after its completion. Ives was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1945, and the Symphony no.3 won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. Bernstein conducted the New York PO in the première of the Symphony no.2 in 1951, over 40 years after its completion, and the Symphony no.1 was finally performed for the first time in 1953, half a century after it was finished.

Throughout this time, Ives continued to work on his music, copying the full score for Thanksgiving during a year in Europe with Harmony in 1932–3, recording his own piano performances and improvisations in London and New York, adding a new ending to the Second Symphony, and pulling old pieces out of his piles of manuscripts. He had photocopies made of his manuscripts and sent them to those who expressed interest in a work. In the early 1930s he dictated reminiscences about his life and his music, intended only to provide information for those writing about him, but published four decades later as Memos. Although in Essays before a Sonata he had seemed a follower of Beethoven, in Memos he emphasized his experimental works and his invention of novel techniques, presenting himself as the pioneer Cowell and others seemed to want him to be, and credited so much influence to his father that he obscured for decades his deep debts to Parker, to the 19th-century Romantic tradition, and to older contemporaries such as Debussy. He worked for years on a revised edition of the Concord Sonata, finally published in 1947. His health gradually weakened, and in May 1954 he died of a stroke while recovering from an operation.

Music continued to appear after his death, and his reputation continued to grow. Harmony Ives gave his manuscripts to the Library of the Yale School of Music in 1955, and John Kirkpatrick published a meticulous catalogue in 1960. The first biography, by Henry and Sidney Cowell in 1955, was followed by a steady stream of theses and articles. The Fourth Symphony was finally played in its entirety in 1965. Memos and other writings appeared in 1972. The Charles Ives Society, which became active in 1973, has sponsored a series of critical editions of individual works with Kirkpatrick and James B. Sinclair the most prominent editors. The 1974 centennial brought the first festivals devoted to Ives’s music, and there have been several since. Extensive interviews with those who knew Ives were published in an abridged form (Perlis, C1974), an extremely valuable resource. A second biography appeared during the centennial (Wooldridge, C1974), and a third (Rossiter, C1975) began a current of reconsidering the legends that had grown up around the composer. The first survey of his music (Hitchcock, D1977) provided a succinct overview of his entire output. Since the mid-1980s, studies have appeared that clarify our picture of Ives’s life, family, career, and psychology (Burkholder, C1985; Moore, C1985; Feder, C1992; Swafford, C1996); demonstrate his strong links to European composers (Gibbens, C1985; Hertz, D1993; Block and Burkholder, B1996); reveal his use of interval cycles, pitch class sets, and other organizing principles (Winters, D1986; Baron, D1987; Lambert, D1987 and D1997; Roller, E1995); trace the American experimental tradition that began with Ives (Nicholls, D1990); treat major works in depth (Meyer, E1991; Rathert, D1991; Block, E1996); describe Ives’s use of stylistic heterogeneity as a formal device (Starr, D1992); and examine his methods of musical borrowing (Burkholder, D1995). He is now regarded more highly for the beauty and power of his music than for his pioneering innovations, which is as it should be, and the meaning and structure of his music are more deeply and widely understood than ever before. His appeal to audiences worldwide continues to broaden, and his place among the leading composers of his time is secure.

See Borrowing, §12

Ives, Charles

WORKS

A chronological listing of Ives’s works is neither possible nor appropriate as dates for many works are uncertain, and Ives tended to work on a number of pieces simultaneously, often taking years from first sketch to final revision.

This work-list follows the ordering, numbering and title style in James B. Sinclair, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Music of Charles Ives (New Haven, 1999), grouping works by genre and numerically or alphabetically within each genre. Most incomplete works, exercises, arrangements of works by others, unidentified fragments, and lost or projected works are omitted. Dates are of manuscripts when extant; these are based on Gayle Sherwood’s datings of the manuscripts by paper type and handwriting, and they may not reflect the entire period of composition if the earliest sketches or final revisions do not survive. Dates in square brackets are from Ives’s own hand but represent pieces or stages of composition for which no manuscripts are extant. Printed works are published in New York unless otherwise stated (reprints are not listed). For full details of publication and first performances, see Sinclair.

MSS in US-NH, photocopies in US-NYp, Wcg

Principal publishers: Arrow, Associated, Mercury, Merion, New Music, Peer, Peters, Presser, G. Schirmer

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Ives, Charles: Works

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Ives, Charles: Works

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Ives, Charles: Works

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Ives, Charles: Works

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Ives, Charles: Works

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Ives, Charles: Works

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