Charles Ives: maverick. That’s a phrase that’s been used so often about this American composer, insurance broker and baseball nut that it’s taken over the reputation of a composer who wrote music on no-one else’s terms but his own.
It’s easy to see why it’s a label that’s stuck. It’s not only that Ives’s Fourth Symphony, posthumously premiered in 1965, required two conductors to co-ordinate its multi-layered richness. No, more than that: from his earliest years, Ives was marked for musical iconoclasm.
His father George Ives led the musical life of Danbury, Connecticut (home to author Louisa May Alcott and others), and he didn’t just teach young Charles in the ways of harmony and counterpoint. As well as the arbitrary rules of conventional music theory, why couldn’t there be a theory of microtones, of many keys and time signatures all together?
‘Ives let the whole darn world tumble into his works’
Charles did it all in the music he conceived as a student at Yale, and beyond. Instead of thinking of his music as a way of filtering out the rest of the world, he let the whole darn world of sounds and meanings teem and tumble into his works. You hear that in the dizzying pile-up of tunes and marching bands in ‘The Fourth of July’ from his New England Holiday Symphony, written in 1912: melodies from ‘Yankee Doodle’ to ‘Marching Through Georgia’ and ‘Dixie’ trample over each other, exactly as they would do at a Fourth of July fair.
Ives’s fearless acceptance of the sounds of the world around him makes him among the most brilliant composers of place, landscape and memory there’s ever been. In ‘From Hanover Square North’, Ives makes a documentary in orchestral sound of how New Yorkers spontaneously sang hymn tunes together when news of the sinking of the Lusitania was reported in May 1915.
His Piano Sonata No. 2, ‘Concord, Mass., 1840-60’, is an evocation of his reading of Hawthorne and Thoreau, the Alcotts and Emerson, and it’s a score that’s also stalked by memories of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. His Unanswered Question pits the stillness of string-druids against an ever-questioning solo trumpeter and the querulous and discombobulated wannabe answerers in the woodwind.
Why is there anything ‘maverick’ about any of this? Yes, Ives is the only composer in history whose life insurance textbooks are still read, and he jealously guarded his independence of thought, as he didn’t have to worry about making his living from his music.
But Ives is only a maverick because our definitions of music have been too narrow to accommodate him. Ives’s radical acceptance of sound and ideas – nature, literature, philosophy, fairgrounds and marching bands – should put him where he belongs: not at the margins, but at the resonant centre of musical culture. The unanswered questions of his music go on provoking us, and if you listen to them deeply enough, they won’t ever stop.