This guy is supposedly a “modern classical composer”. His music sounds like someone dropped a bunch of band instruments down a flight of stairs. I guess that’s modern art, huh? What gives? Maybe we should call this radical style “Punk Classical”?
Just curious to hear what the Sdopers may know about him…
IIRC, he went from selling insurance or real estate to this! Ug!
Hate him. And I’ve got a LOT of perspective and real life experience playing this stuff. And don’t think you and I are alone in this opinion.
Manuscript paper can be a dangerous thing in the wrong hands, folks.
I think he was one of the greatest American composers, and generally underrated. I’m curious what piece you heard that you hated so much. Some of his stuff is impressionistic (not sure if that’s the right term); for example he might try to emulate the sound of a marching band passing by on the street while other things are going on at the same time.
Have you heard his Second Symphony? It’s very listenable - tonal, with a lot of recognizable tunes.
And IIRC, he didn’t “go from” selling insurance to composing, he composed while he worked a full-time job.
Like him. I would not rank him as one of the really great composers, but he definitely was a remarkable figure.
“Classical music” is a very broad field, and many 20th/21st century composers have experimented a lot in their music. If you don’t like that, fine. There is nothing wrong with sticking to the Mozarts and Beethovens. But if you’re willing to listen with an open mind, there is a tremendous amount of interesting ‘modern’ classical music out there. Including Ives.
Charles Ives was a genius and the first truly great American composer. I know I’m not alone in thinking so. You may of course think whatever you like, but Ives’ place among the greatest of American composers is quite secure.
For those truly seeking to better understand Ives’ oeuvre, I recommend the following book:
Larry Starr, A Union of Diversities: Style in the Music of Charles Ives. Schirmer Books, 1992.
It is unfortunately out of print, but you can find copies in your library or in various used book stores.
For me, two things that are remarkable about Ives’ music are his uncanny ear for interesting sonorities and his ability to synthesize elements of the American vernacular (folk songs, hymn tunes, and the like) with a truly unique, sophisticated, modernist musical language. The apparently disparate elements fold into a musical tapestry of great beauty and expression. Good examples are the last movement of the Fourth Symphony, the Concord Sonata, the Third Symphony, the Holidays Symphony, and even the shorter, aphoristic works such as “Central Park in the Dark” and “The Unanswered Question.”
Gustav Mahler was so impressed with Ives’ Third Symphony, he returned from New York carrying a copy of the score with him, with the intention of conducting its premiere. Sadly, Mahler died before he had the chance. This was the Symphony which won Ives the Pulitzer Prize, many years after it was written. It is a beautiful work.
Ives’ use of Americana, often tongue-in-cheek but also treated with great reverence at the same time, sometimes reminds me of Mark Twain, at least in Twain’s earlier years. Both had a knack for finding the humorous and sublime in unexpected places in American culture.
Anyway, I could go on, but I could never do as good as job as Larry Starr does in his book, especially given the limited time I have to respond to this thread. I highly recommend Starr’s book on Ives for those who are interested.
Best,
Knorf
By the way, I feel I should correct a few errors.
First, Ives’ music is approaching being a hundred years old. It’s not especially “modern” anymore.
Second, Ives’ musical training was of the highest quality. He took to selling insurance, and was quite successful at it, because he followed his father’s advice and didn’t want to trust his fortunes to the difficult life of trying to be a composer, which in those days was even harder than it is now. He never gave up his day job, and most of his pieces were given their premieres years after he wrote them. He did not go out of his way to promote his own music.
For more web-based information, go to:
Looks of interesting stuff there.
Knorf
“Don’t pay too much attention to the sounds or you may miss the music.” – George Ives, Charles’s father.
RealityChuck wanna explain that quote for the phillistines here? 
Fan of Ives checking in here. Some of it is difficult, but by this I only mean that it demands–and holds, and rewards–your attention.
I’ll chime in with another Brilliant Composer huzzah. Ives is unique in all of musical history in his use of tonalities. While others trotted off after atonalism, Ives found new ground in tonal music. As difficult as it may be for an untrained ear to hear, the tonal work in Ives music is pure genius. He also used popular melody in ways it hadn’t been used before. Some of his vision/hearing is still beyond us, but I especially like his Third Symphony, The Concord Sonata, and nearly all of his chamber music is absolutely unequalled in their depth and provocative use of harmonies.
He created bi-tonalism (or rather incorporated it as a compositional device, he was taught it from his father who would play in one key and have everyone sing in another, thus improving everyone’s ear). While there are other great American composers (Billings, Copeland, Carter, Ruggles, and even Gershwin and Bernstein) Ives stands head and shoulders above them as an innovator and a producer of rich, multi-textural music.
The Ives story I like is how Aarron Copeland and his crowd came across Ives American Songbook in a used bookstore and they just went crazy over it. Obsessing on it until they had to finally meet the man.
re: “Don’t pay too much attention to the sounds or you may miss the music.” – George Ives
I think what the elder Ives means by that is don’t be distracted by the melody or the hamonies, but listen to the full richness of how it all relates. If you walk away with a melody that’s a good thing, nothing at all wrong with singable music – however melody or harmony alone is not what makes a good piece of music. Some of the most fulfilling musical experiences involve multi-layering of harmonies and melodies gaining more meaning against a counter-melody.
BTW: I like the term Punk-Classical.
“Charles, must you use all the keys at once?” – a former composition instructor of Charles Ives.
I’ve participated in a choral piece of Ives’, and while I’m sure it’s interesting from a compositional standpoint, I sincerely hated it. The tonal clashes really irked me. (Can’t remember the title right now, but it involved full 4-part choir and pipe organ.) Supposedly the organ part involved one hand playing in one key and the other hand playing in another key. It drove me bonkers, like the choral equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard.
Now there are certain tonal clashes that I LOVE (I love Poulenc, although he was somewhat of an acquired taste at first, and Georgian polyphony can literally bring me to tears of joy). But Ives just doesn’t do it for me.
Eva:
You should try to acquire a taste for Ives, it is ultimately very rewarding.
My senior year of high school, our band director decided that one of our contest pieces would be Charles Ives’ Variations on ‘America’. We all got to listen to a recording of it before we even began rehearsing it.
My very first thoughts about it consisted of “Wow, someone’s out of tune” and “Holy expletive, it’s supposed to be that way!” Needless to say, we were a little apprehensive about it. It was a radical departure from our other contest pieces, a march I no longer remember and Alfred Reed’s The Hounds of Spring. The closest any of us in there came to playing a piece like Variations was Mark Camphouse’s A Movement for Rosa the previous year (it was one of our contest pieces along with yet another march I don’t remember and movement one of Johan de Meij’s Symphony No. 1: The Lord of the Rings. Essentially, Variations is the “My Country 'Tis of Thee” partiotic hymn set to different rhythms, styles, keys, etc. And there is a lot of dissonent sections.
By the end of the year, though, Variations had grown on me. Once I got past the initial shock of all the bi-tonal sections, I began to appreciate it for how really shibby it is. It’s a technically challenging piece; you really have to have a good ear to get through the piece during the dissonent parts. The different ways Ives approaches the theme are amazing, in my opinion. It’s my favorite piece from that year’s contest season.
I was intruduced to Ives via *Putnam’s Camp, Redding Connecticut[//i] one of the Three Places in New England pieces. Loved it, loved Ives since.
I notice that some of the people in this thread who hate Ives’s work are musicians. I love to listen to his work, but, then again, I am NOT a musician. I can understand that even though his music may be great to listen to, it’s probably hell on earth to have to play.
I’ve had one run-in with Ives, when I saw the Emerson Quartet play a few years ago. They played three pieces: One Beethoven, one Ives, and then another Beethoven.
I’m not remotely sophisticated enough to understand most of what the musicians in this thread are talking about, but the notes in the program they gave out described the piece and told why it sounded that way, what he was trying to do with it, certain things to listen for to get us boneheads started, &c., and that helped a LOT.
I enjoyed the hell out of it, but almost certainly would have heard nothing but noise if not for the terrific program notes. That was a really stimulating concert.
What most impressed me about Ives’ Three Places in New England was in the Third Movement (The Housatonic At Stockbridge). It opens with a quiet, somewhat melancholy, but conventionally tonal melody. But swirling around that melody are the strings and piano off on their own creating an eerie, jittery suggestion of mental anxiety bordering on psychosis. It’s like a soundtrack to Long Day’s Journey Into Night. We’re become accustomed to such psychological acuity in works like Bernard Herrmann’s score for Psycho, but Ives was there more than a half century earlier!
The piece we did wasn’t especially difficult to sing (Poulenc was far more difficult, because in addition to the odd intervals, the time signature changed seemingly every measure). I just don’t like Ives. No insult to him as a professional, he just isn’t my cup of tea. Not all composers are. As much of a hippie I am and as expansive as my musical tastes are, I can’t love everyone.
I played that this past year in my college’s band. I found that I enjoyed the piece more if I imagined two groups of drunken people, one British, one American, singing “My Country 'Tis of Thee” and “God Save the Queen” at each other. YMMV.