Background
Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1874.
His father was a town bandmaster who experimented with tone clusters, polytonality, quartertones, and acoustics, inspiring similar interests in his son.
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(A momentous release, as Morlot and the Seattle Symphony f...)
A momentous release, as Morlot and the Seattle Symphony follow their acclaimed recording of Ives Symphony No. 2 with the next installment that includes four of the composers greatest works. The rarely recorded Symphony No. 4 is a haunting summation of American musical styles, and one of the masterpieces of American music. It receives here a live performance of staggering authority and eloquence that brings Ives multi-layered sonic canvas to new life. Recorded alongside Symphony No. 3 and Ives two most beloved short orchestral works, this release is engineered to audiophile standards and set to be an authoritative voice among recordings of Ives discography.
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(Ives's First Symphony is an attractive, conservative piec...)
Ives's First Symphony is an attractive, conservative piece with a gorgeous slow movement based on a hymn tune and a finale that sounds strangely like early Bruckner. The Fourth, on the other hand, is arguably his masterpiece, and one of the most radical compositions in the history of music. Scored for a huge orchestra with three solo pianos, chorus, offstage and onstage instruments, and "everything but the kitchen sink" percussion, it requires at least two conductors to keep it all coordinated. Listening to it--despite the commotion in the second movement--is a positively transcendental experience, and the finale resolves itself into one of the most beautiful moments in American music. These performances are smashing (and crashing, where necessary!). --David Hurwitz
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(Charles Ives has grown into one of the most important Ame...)
Charles Ives has grown into one of the most important American classical composers of international distinction, but it wasn't always like this: Ives was frustrated by indifferent audiences and ambivalent critics throughout his entire career and most of his life. Violinist Paul Zukofsky and pianist Gilbert Kalish perform Sonatas No. 3 and No. 4. Evidently, the range of compositional devices Ives used-polytonality, atonality, complex multi-rhythms, tone clusters, twelve-tone rows, metrical modulation, and micro tonality-"disturbed or bewildered nearly all of Ives' contemporaries." But the sonatas present some of the most appealing and listenable material Ives produced. See also FW03346 Charles Ives: The Sonatas for Violin and Piano, Vol. 1.
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composer Insurance agent modernist
Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1874.
His father was a town bandmaster who experimented with tone clusters, polytonality, quartertones, and acoustics, inspiring similar interests in his son.
Ives moved to New Haven, Connecticut in 1893, enrolling in the Hopkins School, where he captained the baseball team. In September 1894, Ives entered Yale University, studying under Horatio Parker.
At Yale he composed in a choral style similar to his mentor, writing church music and even an 1896 campaign song for William McKinley.
He enjoyed sports at Yale and played on the varsity American football team. Michael C. Murphy, his coach, once remarked that it was a "crying shame" that he spent so much time at music as otherwise he could have been a champion sprinter. His works Calcium Light Night and Yale-Princeton Football Game show the influence of college and sports on Ives' composition. He wrote his Symphony No. 1 as his senior thesis under Parker's supervision.
At 14 Charles became organist at Danbury Baptist Church, composing in 1891 his Variations on ‘America’.
Ives continued his work as a church organist until May 1902. Soon after he graduated from Yale, he started work in the actuarial department of the Mutual Life Insurance company of New York. In 1899, Ives moved to employment with the insurance agency Charles H. Raymond & Co. , where he stayed until 1906. In 1907, upon the failure of Raymond & Co. , he and his friend Julian Myrick formed their own insurance agency Ives & Co. , which later became Ives & Myrick, where he remained until he retired. During his career as an insurance executive and actuary, Ives devised creative ways to structure life-insurance packages for people of means, which laid the foundation of the modern practice of estate planning. His Life Insurance with Relation to Inheritance Tax, published in 1918, was well received.
As a result of this he achieved considerable fame in the insurance industry of his time, with many of his business peers surprised to learn that he was also a composer. In his spare time he composed music and, until his marriage, worked as an organist in Danbury and New Haven as well as Bloomfield, New Jersey and New York City.
His works encompass almost every medium, including songs, choral music, chamber pieces, and orchestral music.
In 1907, Ives suffered the first of several "heart attacks" (as he and his family called them) that he had throughout his lifetime. These attacks may have been psychological in origin rather than physical. Following his recovery from the 1907 attack, Ives entered into one of the most creative periods of his life as a composer.
He had a remarkably successful career in insurance, and continued to be a prolific composer until he suffered another of several heart attacks in 1918, after which he composed very little, writing his very last piece, the song "Sunrise", in August 1926. In 1922, Ives published his 114 Songs, which represents the breadth of his work as a composer—it includes art songs, songs he wrote as a teenager and young man, and highly dissonant songs such as "The Majority. "
There have been numerous theories advanced to explain the silence of his late years, which seems as mysterious as the last several decades of the life of Jean Sibelius, who also stopped composing at almost the same time. While he had stopped composing, and was increasingly plagued by health problems, he did continue to revise and refine his earlier work, as well as oversee premieres of his music. After continuing health problems, including diabetes, in 1930 he retired from his insurance business, which gave him more time to devote to his musical work, but he was unable to write any new music. During the 1940s he revised his Concord Sonata, publishing it in 1947 (an earlier version of the sonata and the accompanying prose volume, Essays Before a Sonata were privately printed in 1920).
Ives died of a stroke in 1954 in New York City.
He is one of the first American composers of international renown, though his music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years.
He combined the American popular and church-music traditions of his youth with European art music, and was among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, with musical techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatory elements, and quarter tones, foreshadowing many musical innovations of the 20th century.
(Charles Ives has grown into one of the most important Ame...)
(Ives's First Symphony is an attractive, conservative piec...)
(A momentous release, as Morlot and the Seattle Symphony f...)
Ives proposed in 1920 that there be a 20th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution which would authorize citizens to submit legislative proposals to Congress. Members of Congress would then cull the proposals, selecting 10 each year as referendums for popular vote by the nation's electorate. He even had printed at his own expense several thousand copies of a pamphlet on behalf of his proposed amendment. The pamphlet proclaimed the need to curtail "The effects of too much politics in our representative democracy. " His proposal joined his music in being ignored during his lifetime.
Quotations: According to his wife, one day in early 1927 Ives came downstairs with tears in his eyes. He could compose no more, he said, "nothing sounds right. "
At Yale, Ives was a prominent figure; he was a member of HeBoule, Delta Kappa Epsilon (Phi chapter) and Wolf's Head Society, and sat as chairman of the Ivy Committee.
On November 4, 1894, his father died, a crushing blow to him, but to a large degree he continued the musical experimentation he had begun with him.
After marrying Harmony Twitchell in 1908, they moved into their own apartment in New York.
After his death his widow, who died in 1969 at age 92, bequeathed the royalties from his music to the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the Charles Ives Prize.
