Charles Ives
(1874-1954)
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Major American
Writers: Wallace
Stevens
Charles
Ives
Charles Ives’ Birthplace in Danbury, CT
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
Charles and Harmony Ives Home in Redding, CT
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
Charles Ives
Major American Writers: Wallace
Stevens
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
Forty years ago, in 1934, l published an article in the
magazine Modem Music on the music of Charles Ives, based
on a first acquaintance with the remarkable collection of his
114 Songs that he himself had published and had sent to
me. The essay began: “It will be a long time before we take
the full measure of Charles Ives.” In the intervening forty
years, the music he produced in comparative obscurity has
found a world audience, and the American musical
community has discovered its first composer of major
significance.
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
It is gratifying to realize that only America could have
produced a Charles Ives. Or, to be more specific, only New
England in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In
mid-nineteenth century, when our literature could boast
such writers as Whitman and Thoreau, Emerson and Emily
Dickinson, we had no comparable figure in the field of
serious music. As everyone knows, in its more cultivated
forms, music is the last of the arts to develop. Not until the
advent of this greatly gifted New Englander were we to
point to a comparable figure in the world of symphonic
literature.
In listening to the music of Ives, I have sometimes puzzled
over what it is that makes his work, at its best, so humanly
moving. I am thinking, for example, of the extraordinary
first movement of his Harvest Home Chorales, written in
1897, and set for double chorus, organ, and brass
instruments. In those few pages, Ives reflects a richness of
human experience rarely met with in music of that or any
other period.
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
Ives, when he composed, was incredibly daring: no one
before him had ever ventured so close to setting down on
paper sheer musical chaos The marvel is that he got away
with it. I well remember showing pages to musicians—good
musicians—most of whom thought it very remarkable, but
complained that it was so “confused”—if only he could clean
it up a bit. It’s ironical to think that it is this very
“confusion” that now makes for the special excitement in
Ives’s music. Even some very broad-minded and forwardlooking musicians who had every reason to be interested in
music that was new and different had the same response.
Serge Koussevitzky, at that time conductor of the Boston
Symphony, was definitely intrigued, but I got that same
reaction from him. You can’t play it; it’s too confused. Can’t
he straighten it out.
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
As the full musical stature of Ives the composer became
apparent, the basic tragedy of his situation came to
preoccupy my mind. How, I wondered does a man of such
gifts manage to go on creating in a vacuum, with no
audience at all. As I look back, I was really concerned not so
much with Ives alone, but with the thought of the many
American composers who were writing their music without
sufficient contact with an audience, I thought of Ives as the
prime example. It began with a preoccupation my own: how
does one get an audience, and what happens to a composer
who does not have an audience? In that respect, Ives is a
very American phenomenon. One can hardly imagine such a
man in Europe. To write all that music and not hear it one
would have to have the courage of a lion.
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
It is never easy for a writer to pin down the essence of a
composer’s work. This is particularly true for the music of
Ives, so many-faceted, so rich in textures, and so various in
content, from the simplest to the most complex pages. This
becomes all the more remarkable when one realizes that he
rarely, if ever, heard adequate performances of his more
ambitious during the period of his active creative life.
The upsurge of interest in the music of Ives in recent years,
both at home and abroad, has greatly enhanced the position
of the American composer on both sides of the Atlantic. This
is especially true of the international musical scene, where
our serious composers have been particularly slow to make
their mark. The Ives centennial year (1974) is certain to
increase the worldwide interest in his work.
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
I append to this brief foreword a letter Ives sent me in 1932.
Perhaps I should explain that it was written after a
premiere performance of seven of his songs at the first
Yaddo Festival in Saratoga Springs, New York, on May 1,
1932 [see p. 164]. The festival was followed by a symposium
on music critics and criticism, to which the second
paragraph of his letter refers:
[Aaron Copland]
Low-Wood
Windermere
July 21, 1932
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
Dear Mr. Copland:
I want to write you, if just a line, to tell you that I appreciated
greatly your playing some of my songs. If they went well, it was
due to the way you and Mr. Linscott handled them. I am grateful
to you both. Please thank Mr. Linscott for me.
But the way you stood up in “congress”, and had your say from
“within out” gave added substance to the whole festival. Not
exactly all critics are “lily pads"-—but too many are.
With appreciation and best wishes
Yours sincerely,
Charles E. Ives
When we get back we are looking forward to the pleasure of you
personally—and I hope then to be able to be of some help in the
work in any way I can.
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
Charles Ives
Major American Writers: Wallace
Stevens
Charles Ives
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
Charles Ives
Major American Writers:
Wallace Stevens
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
Charles Ives
Major American
Writers: Wallace
Stevens
Charles Ives
Major American Writers:
Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
Major American Writers:
Wallace Stevens
In these pieces, for all their wide-ranging explorations, Ives
never abandoned the foundations of his experience. mainly his
Danbury childhood. Much of his music is a texture of quotes of
familiar marches, hymns, and national songs; nearly every
piece is a picture of a remembered scene. In Danbury he had
heard thousands of voices singing hymns at camp meetings,
bands pas sing one another in parades, taps played over the
graves of war heroes, his father's cornet soaring over church
congregations, the bells and bands and fireworks of holidays,
old men singing war songs and weeping. Bach and Beethoven
played on parlor pianos and wheezy church organs. These
cherished memories of the music of ordinary people became the
substance of his art, not for their own sake, but for what they
represented. Danbury was a community where people did what
people do—gather to worship, to celebrate, to memorialize the
dead, all companied by music. Danbury was anyplace and
everyplace. For Ives, music was never an abstraction but rather
an embodiment universal human experience. "Music," he once
wrote in a letter to Harmony. “does not represent life, it is life."
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
For twenty years he worked in the office, composed at home, was
father to their adopted daughter and, when World War I came, did
volunteer work on top of it all. But the irony was that while blessed
with extraordinary talent and energy, Ives did not have the
constitution to sustain them. In October 1918 he suffered a
devastating heart attack. Recovering to some degree, he returned
to business and to music. But though he wrote some important
songs in the twenties and reworked a good deal of previous
material, he never again conceived and completed a major piece.
His last work, the elegiac song "Sunrise," dates from 1926.
Physically and creatively. something had gone out of him that he
never recovered.
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives
His health declined steadily. By 1930, when he retired from
business, Ives was spending long stretches helpless in bed.
Through the ensuing invalid years his spirit and personality
never dimmed; he remained vivacious, unpredictable, playful,
sometimes cantankerous but unfailingly generous and kind.
He and Harmony spent much of the year at their country
home in West Redding, Connecticut, just over the hills from
Danbury. The riches he had earned in business flowed into
musical and charitable causes around the world, the number
of musicians and friends and relatives and causes he helped
will never be fully known.
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Charles Ives