Charles Ives continued his work as a church organist until May In he moved to employment with the insurance agency Charles H. During his career as an insurance executive, Ives devised creative ways to structure life-insurance packages for people of means, which laid the foundation of the modern practice of estate planning.
As a result of this he achieved considerable fame in the insurance industry of his time, with many of his business peers surprised to learn that he was also a composer. In , Ives suffered the first of several "heart attacks" as he and his family called them that he had through out his lifetime. These attacks may have been psychological in origin rather than physical.
Following his recovery from the attack, Ives entered into one of the most creative periods of his life as a composer. After marrying Harmony Twitchell in , they moved into their own apartment in New York. He had a remarkably successful career in insurance, and continued to be a prolific composer until he suffered another of several heart attacks in , after which he composed very little, writing his very last piece, the song Sunrise, in August In , Ives published his Songs which represents the breadth of his work as a composer - it includes art songs, songs he wrote as a teenager and young man, and highly dissonant songs such as "The Majority.
While Ives had stopped composing, and was increasingly plagued by health problems, he did continue to revise and refine his earlier work, as well as oversee premieres of his music. After continuing health problems, including diabetes, in he retired from his insurance business, which gave him more time to devote to his musical work, but he was unable to write any new music.
During the 's he revised his Concord Sonata , publishing it in an earlier version of the sonata and the accompanying prose volume, Essays Before a Sonata were privately printed in Ives died in in New York City. His First Symphony shows a grasp of the academic skills needed to write in the traditional sonata form of the late 19 th century, as well as a tendency to display an individual and iconoclastic harmonic style.
His father was a band leader, and like Hector Berlioz, Ives was fascinated with both outdoor music and instrumentation. His attempts to fuse these interests coupled with his devotion to L. Beethoven set the direction for the remainder of his musical life. Charles Ives published a large collection of his songs, many of which had piano parts which paralleled modern movements in Europe, including bitonality and pantonality.
He was an accomplished pianist, capable of improvising in a variety of styles, including those which were then quite new. Although he is now best known for his orchestral music, he composed two string quartets and other works of chamber music. His work as an organist led him to write Variations on "America" in , which he premiered at a recital celebrating the Fourth of July. The piece takes the tune which is the same one as is used for the national anthem of the UK through a series of fairly standard but witty variations; it was not published until The variations differ sharply: a running line, a set of close harmonies, a march, a polonaise, and a ragtime allegro; the interludes are one of the first uses of bitonality; William Schuman arranged this for orchestra in and again for symphonic band in His first symphony is a more conventional piece since Parker had insisted that he stick to the older European style.
However, the second symphony, composed after he had graduated, adopted new techniques that included musical quotes, unusual phrasing and orchestration, and even a blatantly dissonant 11 note chord ending the work.
The second symphony foreshadows his later compositional style even though the piece is relatively conservative by Ives' standards. In Charles Ives composed what some have argued was the first radical musical work of the 20 th century, Central Park in the Dark. The piece evokes an evening comparing sounds from nearby nighin Manhattan playing the popular music of the day, ragtime, quoting Hello My Baby and even Sousa's Washington Post March with the mysterious dark and misty qualities of the Central Park woods played by the strings.
The string harmony uses shifting chord structures that are not solely based on thirds but a combination of thirds, fourths, and fifths. Near the end of the piece the remainder of the orchestra builds up to a grand chaos ending on a dissonant chord, leaving the string section to end the piece save for a brief violin duo superimposed over the unusual chord structures.
Charles Ives had composed two symphonies, but it is with The Unanswered Question , written for the highly unusual combination of trumpet, four flutes, and string orchestra, that he established the mature sonic world that became his signature style.
The strings located offstage play very slow, chorale-like music throughout the piece while on several occasions the trumpet positioned behind the audience plays a short motif that Ives described as "the eternal question of existence".
Each time the trumpet is answered with increasingly shrill outbursts from the flutes onstage - apart from the last: The Unanswered Question. The piece is typical Ives - it juxtaposes various disparate elements, it appears to be driven by a narrative never fully revealed to the audience, and it is tremendously mysterious. Another American Composer, Lou Harrison, greatly promoted and celebrated his work. Ives music gained much popularity towards the end of his career. He even received praise from the legendary Arnold Schoenberg , who was the pioneer of the twelve tone technique.
He received widespread acclaim and attention after his death, as newfound research would go on to extract the true theoretical genius within Ives works. It is, quite simply, the most direct introduction to one of the greatest composers of any age. Be forewarned, though - this is not a disc to enjoy in a conventional sense, especially if you have Rollo or Ladybird tendencies.
Rather, it's a wild, untamed glimpse into the Ives workshop, and a rather messy one at that. Never intended for public consumption, Ives' only recording sessions, held between and , long after his retirement, were undertaken for a far more poignant reason - he just wanted to hear how his music sounded. Pending critical and public attention mostly posthumous , performances of his works were few and recordings rarer still, with none at all until So, with typical Yankee resolve, Ives decided to record some of it himself.
What do we have? Nearly all the cuts are studies and embellishments of the "Emerson" movement of his "Concord" Sonata , with which Ives remained obsessed long after his creative period ended. Ives clearly loved this music and to the horror of would-be performers bridled at the notion of a definitive edition, constantly rewriting it with evolving insight, reveling in "the daily pleasure of playing this music and seeing it grow, and feeling that it is not finished and the hope that it will never be.
We also get three takes of Ives singing his patriotic song, "They Are There. Perhaps bellowing or manic ranting is more like it. As his father once told him, "Don't pay too much attention to the sounds or you may miss the music. After 73 minutes of such challenging, improvisational stuff, the disc concludes on a breathtaking note - an exquisite performance of the "Alcott" movement of the Concord Sonata that is as gorgeous, straightforward and inviting as the rest had been thorny, bewildering and alienating.
The theme is lifted from the famous opening "fate" motif of Beethoven's Fifth but with a wistful tail, firmly tonal but with searching distant harmonies, strong and bold but with tender, honest emotion. It's nothing less than a microcosm of our national history, in which our forefathers crafted their conservative immigrant traditions into a new home-grown revolutionary spirit, cherishing the respected ideals of the past yet aglow with confidence in the promise of a boundless future.
Recommended Ives recordings? Taking a cue from his own records, it would seem a gross violation of the Ives spirit to apply the usual criteria of technical precision, recording quality or, worst of all, interpretive approach.
After all, this was a man who scorned the musical establishment and who took genuine delight in printers' errors. Rather, the only valid consideration would seem to be the enthusiasm and spirit of the performance. For that, I most often turn to the pioneers, from a time not so long ago when advocating Ives was a lonely and unrewarding mission. Perhaps Ives' most accessible score is his Symphony 2 , a remarkably fluent blend of borrowings ranging from Brahms and Wagner to "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean" and reveille that even Ladybirds should enjoy.
Nearly a half-century after its completion, Leonard Bernstein led the world premiere with the New York Philharmonic in Ives published a large collection of songs, many of which had piano parts. He composed two string quartets and other works of chamber music, though he is now best known for his instrumental music. He started work on this in and completed most of it in The piece was a typical Ives as it juxtaposed various elements and it was very mysterious.
He worked on this from to This symphony is notable for its complexity and over sized orchestra. This symphony has four movements and a complete performance of this symphony was not given until , i.
This was due to his health problems as well as his shifting idea of the work. Many of his published works went unperformed even many years after his death in But his reputation in more recent years has greatly increased. His musical experiments, including his increasing use of dissonance, were not well received by his contemporaries.
Furthermore, the difficulties in performing the rhythmic complexities in his major orchestral works made them daunting challenges even decades after they were composed. Ives began to acquire some public recognition during the s, with performances of a chamber orchestra version of his Three Places in New England both in the U.
Boatwright and Kirkpatrick recorded a new selection of songs for the Ives Centennial Collection that Columbia Records published in His obscurity lifted a bit in the s, when he 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. The next year, this piece won Ives the Pulitzer Prize for Music.
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