Ives the Innovator

There is a great Man living in this Country--a composer. He has solved the problem of how to preserve one's self and to learn. He responds to negligence by contempt. He is not forced to accept praise or blame. His name is Ives.

--Arnold Schoenberg, in a note found after his death in 1951

For most of his life, Charles Edward Ives (1874-1954) was known to friends and business associates as a successful insurance executive who also dabbled in composing odd and seemingly unplayable music. He was past 50 in fact before anyone important performed his works. He finished his Symphony No. 3, for example, in 1904; it was not performed until 1946, and a year later earned Ives a Pulitzer Prize. He finished his Symphony No. 4 in 1916; it was not played in its entirety until 1965.

Today, more than half a century after he completed the bulk of his work, Ives is generally acknowledged as the greatest, certainly the most original of America's composers. A fierce, patriotic innovator, he combined the best instincts of Edison and Whitman; he was the first important American to pioneer a musical path outside the European tradition. He was once thought of, erroneously, as a kind of Grandma Moses of music, an untutored primitive breaking all the rules without realizing it. Ives broke the rules all right, but only after having mastered them as a Yale music student. "I found I could not go on using the familiar chords only," he once said. "I heard something else." In his plural textures and unconventional progressions, he was creative kin to Pound. In his bald and unashamed quoting of pop tunes, he can be said to have prophesied pop art. In the incredible tensions he built up by playing one key or rhythm against another, or in the way he could move dreamily from tender simplicity to the densest of instrumental textures, he was a forward-looking denizen of the age of anxiety. He was in short an original.

To mark the 100th anniversary of his birth in Danbury, Conn., the nation's musical forces are giving Ives' music the kind of extensive exposure it never had during his lifetime. In Florida, the University of Miami is sponsoring a seven-month celebration, during which 35 musical organizations intend to perform all of Ives' published works. Conductor Pierre Boulez and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center have devoted a week to an Ives festival. Yale University and Brooklyn College concluded a joint Charles Ives Centennial Festival-Conference last week.

There is a handsome new five-LP album, Charles Ives, the 100th Anniversary (Columbia; $27.98), which includes some of Ives' own piano performances and has already worked its way onto the classical bestseller lists. Best of several new books is Vivian Perlis' Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History (Yale University Press; $12.50), a compilation of interviews with 57 school chums, business associates, relatives and musicians who knew him as well as anyone could know a reticent and often crusty New Englander.

Ives' father George was a bandmaster and, until the flowering of his son's talent, Danbury's leading musical citizen. George rigged a contrivance (24 violin strings spread across a clothespress) that produced quarter tones. Determined to stretch his son's musical ear, he had him sing Swanee River in the key of E-flat while Dad accompanied in the key of C. Small wonder that Charles the composer would go on to use polytonality and polyrhythms long before those techniques emerged in the works of Stravinsky and other 20th century musical giants. As Composer Aaron Copland puts it in his preface to the Perlis book: "No one before him had ever ventured so close to setting down on paper sheer musical chaos. The marvel is that he got away with it."

Thoughtful Style. Until a heart attack in 1918 sapped his energy, Ives composed almost all of his music in the evenings and on weekends. Weekdays he spent working as a founding partner in the prominent New York insurance agency, Ives & Myrick, where he conceived the idea of "estate planning." Ives took almost as sweeping and humanitarian a view of life insurance as he did of music. He bucked at the notion that coverage was a privilege of the well-to-do, and began issuing more small policies to low-income householders. He also organized the Ives & Myrick training school for agents, which other insurance companies quickly imitated. Ives himself wrote the firm's sales handbook The Amount to Carry--Measuring the Prospect. It became a Bible of the industry. His memos to his agents were low in sales talk and high in a thoughtful style worthy of the Concord philosophers. Example: "When Wordsworth said that he could write like Shakespeare if he had a mind to, Charles Lamb replied: 'Yes--the mind is the only thing lacking'... So if [the agent] cannot increase his business in 1916 it will be because 'the mind is lacking.'"

In a memoir, Ives attempted to answer the question of why a man so in love with music would go so enthusiastically into business. "Father felt that a man could keep his music-interest stronger, cleaner, bigger and freer, if he didn't try to make a living out of it... If he has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances--answer that!"

That Ives could have written his major works without hearing them or having an audience is a sad kind of life-accommodation for a composer. It also makes Ives, in Copland's words, "a very American phenomenon." In the U.S. today, any number of composers write without sufficient public contact, some even adopting a "who cares" attitude.

Ives may have cared, but it did not show. He would not send his manuscripts to publishers and would not try to have his music played in public. A thoroughgoing, stubborn damyankee, he knew that he was ahead of his time and preferred not to hear it at all rather than hear it played poorly. In 1951 Ives turned down an invitation to attend Leonard Bernstein's premiere of the Symphony No. 2 in New York. But he did venture into the kitchen and listen to the broadcast on the maid's radio (he did not own one himself). Delighted, he came out dancing a jig.

Ives' work remains easier to praise than to listen to. At its most difficult, it ranks with late Beethoven, Bartok and Schoenberg for complexity. Even "friendly" works, like the two string quartets and Three Places in New England, take a lot of loving to like. But then, Ives never made things easy for himself and was not about to make them easy for the listener. He thought of music and all art as a bridge between men and once posed a question: "Where is the bridge placed--at the end of the road, or only at the end of our vision?" The importance of Ives was that his vision extended beyond most of the roads.

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