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Charles Ives<\/a><\/strong>: maverick. That\u2019s a phrase that\u2019s been used so often about this American composer, insurance broker and baseball nut that it\u2019s taken over the reputation of a composer who wrote music on no-one else\u2019s terms but his own.<\/p> It\u2019s easy to see why it\u2019s a label that\u2019s stuck. It\u2019s not only that Ives\u2019s 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. <\/p> His father George Ives led the musical life of Danbury, Connecticut (home to author Louisa May Alcott<\/a><\/strong> and others), and he didn\u2019t just teach young Charles in the ways of harmony<\/a><\/strong> and counterpoint. As well as the arbitrary rules of conventional music theory, why couldn\u2019t there be a theory of microtones, of many keys and time signatures<\/a><\/strong> all together?\u00a0<\/p> 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 \u2018The Fourth of July\u2019 from his New England Holiday Symphony<\/em>, written in 1912: melodies from \u2018Yankee Doodle\u2019 to \u2018Marching Through Georgia\u2019 and \u2018Dixie\u2019 trample over each other, exactly as they would do at a Fourth of July fair.<\/p>‘Ives let the whole darn world tumble into his works’<\/h3>