Charles Ives (1874-1954)

American composer and businessman. Ives's father George Ives had been a bandmaster during the Civil War and continued in the profession in Danbury, Connecticut, a locus of patriotic song, holiday picnics on the town green, and baseball. At church on Sunday there was organ playing and the grand old hymns with which American Protestantism is so richly endowed. Like Leopold Mozart, George Ives honed his children's aural and dextral skills by having them play hymns at the piano, but with the left and right hands in different keys. Experiences such as these conditioned Charles Ives with an unusual sensitivity to the sounds around him: how in a parade, for example, you hear not just one band passing in review but the others before and after. In real life, and especially outdoors, music can be a happy cacophony, and it was one in which Ives took special joy. All these experiences found their way into Ives's music, at which he worked most assiduously in the years between the beginning of the century and World War I. Composition for Ives had little to do with the public: he did not seek to have his works performed, and published only a few, the better to be able to give them away to friends. These included a collection of 114 Songs and a piano sonata called Concord, Massachusetts (1915), where each movement is named after the town's celebrated literary figures: Emerson, Hawthorne, The Alcotts, Thoreau. There is, too, a published collection of Essays before a Sonata, 1920. The great instrumental works--quartets, symphonies, and other compositions grouped into what he called orchestral sets--remained in manuscript. Of these the most frequently programmed are The Unanswered Question and Central Park in the Dark (the Second Orchestral Set) and Three Places in New England.

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