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Charles Edward Ives (October 20, 1874 – May 19, 1954) was an American composer of classical music. He is widely regarded as one of the first American classical composers of international significance. Ives's music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Over time, Ives would come to be regarded as one of the "American Originals", a composer working in a uniquely American style, with American tunes woven through his music, and a reaching sense of the possibilities in music.
Biography
Ivess early music Ives was trained at Yale, and his First Symphony shows a grasp of the academic skills required to write in the Sonata Form of the late 19th century, as well as an iconoclastic streak, with a second theme that implies different harmonic direction. His father was a band leader, and as with Hector Berlioz, Ives had a fascination with outdoor music and with instrumentation. His attempts to fuse these two musical pillars, and his devotion to Beethoven, would set the direction for his musical life. Ives published a large collection of his songs, many of which had piano parts which echoed modern movements begun 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 1891, 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 United Kingdom) through a series of fairly standard but witty variations. One of the variations is in the style of a polonaise while another, added some years after the piece had originally been composed, is probably Ives's first use of bitonality. William Schuman arranged this for orchestra in 1964. Around the turn of 20th century Ives was composing his 2nd Symphony which would begin a departure from the conservative teachings of Horatio Parker, his composition professor at Yale. His 1st symphony (composed while at Yale) was not unconventional since Parker had insisted he stick to the older European style. However, the 2nd symphony (composed after he graduated) would include such new techniques as musical quotes, unusual phrasing and orchestration, and even a blatantly dissonant 11 note chord ending the work. The 2nd would foreshadow his later compositional style even though the piece is relatively conservative by Ives's standards. In 1906 Ives would compose what some would argue would be the 1st radical musical work of the 20th century, "Central Park in the Dark". The piece simulates an evening comparing sounds from nearby nightclubs in Manhattan (playing the popular music of the day, ragtime, quoting "Hello My Baby") with the mysterious dark and misty qualities of the Central Park woods (played by the strings). The string harmony uses a shifting chord structures that, for the first time in musical history, 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. Ives had composed two symphonies, but it is with The Unanswered Question (1908), written for the highly unusual combination of trumpet, four flutes, and string quartet, that he established the mature sonic world which would be 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 that we are never made fully aware of, and it is tremendously mysterious. He later made an orchestral version that became one of his more popular works. Mature Period from 1910-1920 Starting around 1910 Ives would begin composing his most accomplished works including the "Holidays Symphony" and arguably his most well known piece "Three Places in New England". Ives's mature works of this era would eventually compare with the two other great musical innovators at the time (Schoenberg and Stravinsky) making the case that Ives was the 3rd great innovator of early 20th century composition. No less of an authority than Arnold Schoenberg himself would compose a brief poem near the end of his life honoring Ives's greatness as a composer. Pieces such as The Unanswered Question were almost certainly influenced by the New England transcendentalist writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. These were important influences to Ives, as he acknowledged in his Piano Sonata No. 2: Concord, Mass., 1840–60 (1909–15), which he described as an "impression of the spirit of transcendentalism that is associated in the minds of many with Concord, Mass., of over a half century ago...undertaken in impressionistic pictures of Emerson and Thoreau, a sketch of the Alcotts, and a scherzo supposed to reflect a lighter quality which is often found in the fantastic side of Hawthorne." The sonata is possibly Ives's best-known piece for solo piano (although it should be noted that there are optional parts for viola and flute). Rhythmically and harmonically, it is typically adventurous, and it demonstrates Ives's fondness for quotation — on several occasions the opening motto from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is quoted. It also contains one of the most striking examples of Ives's experimentalism: in the second movement, he instructs the pianist to use a 14¾ in (37.5 cm) piece of wood to create a massive cluster chord. Main article: Symphony No. 4 (Ives) Perhaps the most remarkable piece of orchestral music Ives completed was his Symphony No. 4 (1910–16). The list of forces required to perform the work alone is extraordinary. The work closely mirrors The Unanswered Question. There is no shortage of novel effects. (A tremolando is heard throughout the second movement. A fight between discordace and traditional tonal music is heard in the final movement. The piece ends quietly with just the percussion playing.) A complete performance was not given until 1965, almost half a century after the symphony was completed, and years after Ive's death. Ives left behind material for an unfinished Universe Symphony, which he was unable to assemble in his lifetime despite two decades of work. This was due to his health problems as well as his shifting conception of the work. There have been several attempts at completion or performing version. However, none has found its way into general performance.Grove, "Last works, 1918–1927" The symphony takes the ideas in the Symphony No. 4 to an even higher level, with complex cross rhythms and difficult layered dissonance along with unusual instrumental combinations. Ives's chamber works include the String Quartet No. 2, where the parts are often written at extremes of counterpoint, ranging from spiky dissonance in the movement labelled "Arguments" to transcendentally slow. This range of extremes is frequent in Ives's music — crushing blare and dissonance contrasted with lyrical quiet — and carried out by the relationship of the parts slipping in and out of phase with each other. Ives's idiom, like Mahler's, employed highly independent melodic lines. It is regarded as difficult to play because many of the typical signposts for performers are not present. This work had a clear influence on Elliott Carter's Second String Quartet, which is similarly a four-way theatrical conversation. Reception Ives's music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. His tendency to experimentation and his increasing use of dissonance were not well taken by the musical establishment of the time. The difficulties in performing the rhythmic complexities in his major orchestral works made them daunting challenges even decades after they were composed. One of the more damning words one could use to describe music in Ives's view was "nice", and his famous remark "use your ears like men!" seemed to indicate that he did not care about his reception. On the contrary, Ives was interested in popular reception, but on his own terms. Early supporters of his music included Henry Cowell and Elliott Carter. Invited by Cowell to participate in his periodical New Music, a substantial number of Ives's scores were published in the journal, but for almost 40 years he had few performances that he did not arrange or back, generally with Nicolas Slonimsky as the conductor. His obscurity began to lift a little in the 1940s, 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. 3 (1904) in 1946. Leta E. Miller. "Lou Harrison", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (accessed March 21 2006), grovemusic.com (subscription access). The next year, this piece won Ives the Pulitzer Prize for Music. However, Ives gave the prize money away (half of it to Harrison), saying "prizes are for boys, and I'm all grown up". Leopold Stokowski took on the Symphony No. 4 not long thereafter, regarding the work as "the heart of the Ives problem". At this time, Ives was also promoted by Bernard Herrmann, who worked as a conductor at CBS and in 1940 became principal conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra. While there he was a champion of Charles Ives's music. Recognition of Ives's music has improved. He would find praise from Arnold Schoenberg, who regarded him as a monument to artistic integrity, and from the New York School of William Schuman. In the present, Michael Tilson Thomas is an enthusiastic exponent of Ives's symphonies as is musicologist Jan Swafford. Ives's work is regularly programmed in Europe. Ives has also inspired pictorial artists, notably Eduardo Paolozzi who entitled one of his 1970s suites of prints Calcium Light Night, each print being named for an Ives piece, (including Central Park in the Dark). At the same time Ives is not without his critics. Many people still find his music bombastic, pompous. Others find it, strangely enough, timid in that the fundamental sound of European traditional music is still present in his works. His onetime supporter Elliot Carter has called his work incomplete. Influence on 20th-century music Ives was a great supporter of 20th century music. This he did in secret, telling his beneficiaries it was really Mrs. Ives who wanted him to do so. Nicolas Slonimsky, who introduced many new works from the podium and whose Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns influenced not only avant garde classical composers but also jazz improvisers John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Pharaoh Sanders, and their colleagues in the 1950s, said in 1971, "He financed my entire career." List of selected works Note: Because Ives often made several different versions of the same piece, and because his work was generally ignored during his lifetime, it is often difficult to put exact dates on his compositions. The dates given here are sometimes best guesses. There have even been speculations that Ives purposely misdated his own pieces earlier or later than actually written. Further reading | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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