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Published: Tuesday, 13 August 2024 at 11:22 AM


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.