‘My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us,’ Elgar said in 1896, ‘the world is full of it and you simply … take as much as you require.’ I’ve a hunch that Ives would have understood exactly what Elgar meant, for perhaps more than any composer before or since, his music is at its heart a sonic evocation of the world he lived in.

Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1874 to a family of abolitionists that had deep roots in the area. Danbury was a small but booming New England town – the largest producer of hats in the nation, in fact – with dozens of factories and, even in the days of the composer’s youth, stirrings of labour unrest. Yet, in his adult life, Ives’s memories of his home town remained idyllic. His family had been movers and shakers in the community for generations, as well as closely connected with the New England transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson (who, according to family lore, had once spent the night in Ives’s uncle’s house) and Henry David Thoreau. Most of the Ives menfolk were prominent lawyers or businessmen, with the notable exception of Ives’s musician father, George.

The youngest bandmaster in the Union Army, George Ives returned home from the civil war and became the lynchpin of Danbury’s musical life, so his son grew up immersed in music. Young Charles’s gifts became apparent soon enough, and by the time he was 14, he was the youngest salaried church organist in his state. He’d continue to work as an organist and choirmaster through his studies at Yale University with the American-born, Europe-trained composer Horatio Parker, and into his first years living in New York City.

In 1894, while Ives was still at university, his father died suddenly of a stroke – a devastating loss. One doesn’t have to delve too deeply into Ives’s life and work to see that whatever he learnt from the traditional, conservatory-like training he received at Yale, it ultimately mattered less than the highly unconventional education his father had given him back in Danbury. In Ives’s memory, his father had been an intrepid musical explorer fascinated with odd notions like polytonality (he had his family singing in one key while he accompanied them at the piano in another) and quarter-tones (he had his family singing these as well). In a famous anecdote, his father sent two bands marching around town playing different music in order to enjoy the ‘cheerful discord’ and ever‑changing spatial effects. In another, the young Ives and his father came upon a stonemason singing off key. ‘Look into his face and hear the music of the ages,’ his father told him. ‘Don’t pay too much attention to the sounds – for if you do, you may miss the music. You won’t get a wild, heroic ride to heaven on pretty little sounds.’

CLIMBING THE LADDER

Ives would come to abhor ‘pretty little sounds’, although he’d proved he could more or less toe the line, composing his Dvo∑ák-like First Symphony (1898) under Parker’s tutelage. More quintessentially Ivesian, though, is the First String Quartet, which he began at around the same time and completed in 1902. Subtitled From the Salvation Army, the music is drawn from organ pieces he’d written for church use, and includes quotations of hymns he’d heard (and played) at evangelical religious revival services back in Danbury. Almost from the beginning, then, Ives was putting the sounds in the air around him into his music, and more often than not, these were the nostalgic sounds of his New England boyhood – hymns, gospel tunes, patriotic songs, marches, ragtime numbers and popular ditties. According to Ives scholar J Peter Burkholder, the First String Quartet was ‘his first thoroughgoing synthesis of American music with the genres and styles of European art music’.

In 1898, after graduating from Yale, Ives moved to New York City, where he took a day job as a clerk in the insurance business. Despite his shy nature, he quickly climbed the corporate ladder, and in 1906 he started his own firm with a partner. They made a fortune, and their success was due almost entirely to Ives, who’d invented the highly lucrative business of estate planning (his sales methods are employed and studied even today). Soon after, he quit his job as organist and choirmaster, so his musical activity was relegated to composing on weeknights, weekends and holidays. Not needing to make music for a living, however, he had the freedom to write as daringly as he pleased; the catch was finding anyone interested in playing or listening to it.

Running a successful business, raising a family (he married Harmony Twichell in 1908 and they later adopted a daughter) and composing in his spare time took a toll on his health. He was diabetic and suffered a major heart attack in 1918, after which he composed only short pieces and tinkered with the major works he’d already put to paper. But he’d been surprisingly prolific before that, producing four symphonies, two orchestral suites, four tone poems, two string quartets, a piano trio, four violin sonatas, two massive piano sonatas, choral works as well as more than 100 songs. He stopped composing in 1926, although he lived for nearly three decades after that; yet when he died in 1954 at the age of 79, his music was only just beginning to attract a wider audience.

NEW WINE, OLD BOTTLES

Of his major orchestral works, the most approachable are the Second and Third Symphonies. The Second was likely composed over the better part of a decade and completed sometime around 1909. It’s a substantial work in five movements that still more or less resembles its European counterparts in terms of formal design, although the musical content is now unmistakably in the American vernacular. Speaking to the audience before conducting a performance of the work in Munich in the 1980s, Leonard Bernstein said: ‘His music has all the freshness of a naive American wandering in the grand palaces of Europe, like some of Henry James’s Americans abroad – or, perhaps better still, like Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad”. The European spirit has, by some Connecticut alchemy, been Americanised.’

Bernstein was as much a champion of Ives’s music as he was, more famously, of Mahler’s – and, as it happens, there’s an unexpected connection between the two composers. Just before leaving New York in 1911, after his final, gruelling season as music director of the New York Philharmonic, Mahler happened upon the score of Ives’s Third Symphony at a copyist’s office. After a quick perusal, he took it with him, presumably with the intention of performing it. Jan Swafford, in his authoritative and compulsively readable 1996 biography of Ives, writes, ‘Mahler had glanced at a symphony by an unknown and apparently amateurish American and recognized a kindred spirit. He saw a composer placing, as he did, the commonplace, the humble, the shopworn in a symphonic context, and in the process renewing both the material and the symphonic genre. Mahler also saw a deliberate and touching musical naïveté close, in its Yankee voice, to his own way of evoking Austrian folk songs and ländlers.’ If Mahler hadn’t died a few months later, and had ended up adding this symphony to his repertoire, Ives’s career might have taken a very different turn.

The Third Symphony (1908-11) is more modest than the Second. Subtitled The Camp Meeting, it’s a nostalgic backwards glance to those evangelical revival meetings back in Danbury, much like the First String Quartet, and similarly abounds with quotations of hymn tunes; yet it’s exploratory in its own quiet way – especially in passages where Ives creates a contrapuntal pile-on of seemingly disparate melodic lines. But still, both the Second and Third Symphonies offer an easy pathway to Ives’s musical universe.

The Unanswered Question, originally completed in 1908 (and revised in the 1930s), is similarly welcoming and brings us a small step closer to what Ives is all about. The title comes from Emerson’s cryptic poem ‘The Sphinx’, and the music is revealing of Ives’s philosophical bent, with its echoes of New England transcendentalism and Yankee self-reliance. Musically, there are three distinct and quasi-independent elements or layers: the strings, who play with cloud-like softness in a serene major tonality; a trumpet, whose repeated five-note motif represents the ‘perennial question of existence’ (as Ives described it); and four flutes, who answer the trumpet in increasingly distressed and dissonant counterpoint. As befits the title, the trumpet’s final query goes unanswered, hanging in the air as the strings maintain what Ives called the ‘silence of the druids’. It all sounds very simple, and it is – but that’s the beauty of it. Few of Ives’s works reveal themselves with such succinct clarity.

TRANSCENDENTAL ÉTUDES

Ives remained virtually unknown in the music world until he was in his mid-sixties. The Third Symphony wasn’t performed until 1946 (composer Lou Harrison led the premiere), and the Second until 1951, when Bernstein conducted it with the New York Philharmonic. (Ives, who was too frail to travel to Carnegie Hall from Connecticut, listened to the radio broadcast in stoic silence.) The tide had begun to turn in 1939 when John Kirkpatrick gave the premiere in New York of the thorny yet rapturous Second Piano Sonata, Concord, Mass, 1840-60. The work had been more or less complete since 1915, and Ives self-published it in 1920, along with a prefatory volume entitled Essays before a Sonata. Individual movements of the work were performed in the years thereafter, but Kirkpatrick was the first to present it in its entirety. Writing in the New York Herald Tribune, the influential critic Lawrence Gilman proclaimed the sonata to be ‘exceptionally great music – it is, indeed, the greatest music composed by an American, and the most deeply and essentially American in impulse and implication’.

Gilman’s review also took pains to position Ives as a prophet who had evolved this ‘incredible ultra-modernism’ before Schoenberg had even written Verklärte Nacht and while ‘the youthful Stravinsky’ was still ‘playing marbles’. In 1966, Stravinsky himself spoke of Ives ‘exploring the 1960s during the heyday of Strauss and Debussy’. This was all terrific publicity, of course, but it ultimately proved problematic, as Richard Taruskin notes in The Oxford History of Western Music (2005), and for a time, Ives’s music was valued not so much for what it was but rather for when it had been composed.

Ives in his early seventies, by which time his music was beginning to be recognised (photography: Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo)

Taruskin argues (convincingly, I think) that Ives was not a modernist at all, in fact, and that despite his sometimes ‘blustery uncouthness of manner’, the substance of his art was very much the same as that of the European composers he’d studied with Parker. ‘For a progressive and a populist like Ives,’ he writes, ‘his strange music would be unacceptably esoteric and “elite” were it not validated by his everyday experience, of which it formed a nostalgic record.’ Or, to put it another way, it’s the incorporation of the sounds from the air around him – from the ‘fate’ motif of Beethoven’s Fifth that haunts much of the Concord Sonata to the hymns and songs of his youth – that gives his music emotional weight and meaning.

In some respects, however, Ives’s musical experiments were prophetic. In his book Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life (2008), composer John Adams (a superb Ives conductor, by the way) argues that some of Ives’s rhythmic ideas ‘are so far ahead of their time that one is left both humbled and amazed’. He says that Ives hit upon something very special in the orchestral triptych Three Places in New England (1903-14, rev 1929) and the Fourth Symphony (1910-c1925): ‘his own kind of Impressionism that was in part achieved by constantly emerging and receding levels of musical activity’. He notes a ‘highly refined sense of foreground, middle ground and background – an ordering of musical ideas according to their imagined placement in a perspective, just as a painter might fill a canvas with a mix of images’. It was, he says, ‘a radically different way of treating musical material from the traditional rhetorical procedures of European art music, where the discourse is far more linear and spun out’. Indeed, it was so radically different that when Leopold Stokowski led the first complete performance of the Fourth Symphony in 1965, two assistant conductors were required in order to manage its myriad multilayered rhythmic and metric complexities. And this was as Ives had planned it, actually, although a newer edition of the score has made it possible for the work to be directed by a single conductor.

Imagine sitting in Carnegie Hall for that 1965 premiere at the time when Stockhausen was supposedly breaking new ground with works like Gruppen (1957) and Carré (1960) for multiple ensembles, and it’s easy to understand the groundswell of awed enthusiasm for a composer so clearly ahead of his time. But, even in his grandest and most dizzyingly complicated compositions, like the Concord Sonata and Fourth Symphony, the complexity was merely a means to an end, not the end in itself. In many works, Ives evokes a palpable sense of place and time. In the marchlike opening movement of Three Places in New England, for example, we’re taken to Boston Common, where Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s bronze relief commemorates the black regiment marching south to fight for the Union in the civil war. In the gradual crescendo of ‘The Fourth of July’ from A Symphony: New England Holidays (1897-1913, rev 1920s and ’30s), we’re transported not just to a small town, but back in time, to experience a young boy’s growing excitement for a celebration that ends in fireworks.

In the Concord Sonata, we encounter Ives’s very personal reactions to writings by four figures associated with New England transcendentalism: the sheer density and knottiness of ‘Emerson’ suggests the struggle of making sense of that philosopher’s ideas; the flitting, phantasmal images in ‘Hawthorne’ are inspired by that author’s short stories; ‘The Alcotts’ paints a homey portrait of that family’s ‘spiritual sturdiness’ (Ives’s words); and in ‘Thoreau’, we spend the day with Henry David at Walden Pond, and as night falls, it may seem that the ‘whole body is one sense’. The Concord Sonata is, therefore, a spiritual journey – and so is the Fourth Symphony, which begins with the questioning, nocturnal Prelude, continues with ‘Comedy’ (a scherzo inspired by Hawthorne’s short story The Celestial Railroad – a satirisation of empty religious promises) and Fugue (reworked from the opening movement of the First String Quartet), and concludes with a solemn processional led on by the hymn tune ‘Bethany’, with its repeated, beseeching refrain ‘Nearer my God, to Thee’.

I HEAR AMERICA SINGING

In 1934, Copland wrote: ‘It will be a long time before we take the full measure of Charles Ives.’ And happily or sadly (depending on your viewpoint), this sentiment seems to hold true even today. Ives remains one of the most complex figures in American music. Scholars are still trying to make sense of his hagiographic attitude towards his father; his sometimes offensively misogynistic and homophobic rants about ‘the ladies’ and their timid tastes and the ‘sissies’ who, when confronted with dissonant sounds, should ‘sit up and use their ears like a man’; and whether or not he consciously changed the dates on his manuscripts to appear more ahead of his time than he actually was (unlikely, I believe). Most crucially, they are still attempting to wrest definitive editions from his scribbled and rescribbled manuscripts. (As I write this, the brilliant pianist and Ives specialist Donald Berman – a student of Kirkpatrick – has just released a new recording of the Concord Sonata with several pages’ worth of new additions.)

Ives and wife Harmony: West Redding, Connecticut, c1948 (photography: CSU Archives/Everett Collection / Bridgeman Images)

It’s all too easy to get swept up by the lore and all the controversies, but in essence these are distractions, and perhaps the most direct path to Ives’s musical and spiritual soul is through his songs. In 1922, he self-published a collection of 114 of them – from his earliest student works to his most ‘modern’ – which he sent to libraries, musicians, friends and anyone he thought would take an interest. The variety in this volume is staggering, even perplexing. Many are hugely entertaining, others profoundly moving. ‘Where else in American music’, Copland asks, ‘will you find more sensitiveness or quietude than in a song like Serenity, with its subtle syncopations and its instinctive melodic line; where more delicate tone painting than the setting of lines from Paradise Lost called Evening; where a more rousing or amusing knockout of a song than Charlie Rutlage with its exciting cowboy quotations; where songs to compare with The Indians, or Ann Street, or Maple Leaves or The See’r or The New River (this last contains remarkable Hindemithian premonitions)?’ Reading Copland’s assessment, the question arises: in all these intervening years, has the US produced a composer of art songs to match Ives in range and quality? I don’t think so. And what’s so special about these songs – and nearly everything else that Ives wrote, for that matter – is that they’re as thoroughly American as Walt Whitman’s poetry or Edward Hopper’s paintings.

When Leonard Bernstein conducted the premiere of Ives’s Second Symphony in 1951, he prefaced the performance with remarks in which he called Ives ‘our Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson of music’. More than half a century later, in a 2018 documentary on Ives, Adams echoed that sentiment: ‘If I were a politician, I’d look up to Abraham Lincoln; as a composer, I look up to Charles Ives.’ It may appear odd for a composer who laboured in obscurity for most of his life to be considered the ‘founding father’ of American music; but then, Ives managed to do what no composer before him had done: to capture the American life of the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries in extraordinarily vivid sonic canvases that are very much of their time, yet – in part because of their wonderful strangeness – timeless.

This feature originally appeared in the August 2024 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue of the world's leading classical music magazine – subscribe to Gramophone today