Charles Ives

Born:  Danbury; October 20, 1874
Died:  New York City; May 19, 1954

Entry by Herbert F. Janick

Charles Ives, the man and his music, straddled two cultures. In one respect his life was the classic American success story. Ives was graduated from Yale College, married the daughter of a prominent Hartford minister, and ultimately became a wealthy insurance company executive in New York City. Yet Ives had another career—barely noticed and unappreciated until long after his creative prime—as a composer of atonal, nonmetrical, experimental music. By the time of his death, he was celebrated as a prophet of avant-garde culture, a "Walt Whitman of American music."

The artistic talents of Ives peaked early. His composing career was brief, accelerating after 1894 when his father George, the youngest bandmaster in the Civil War who contributed enormously to his son's musical development, died unexpectedly. After he himself suffered a heart attack in 1918, Charles did little composing, contenting himself with reworking and attempting to publicize earlier material—“housecleaning,” he termed it. When he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1947, it was for a symphony that he had written forty years earlier.

The Ives music that the public belatedly discovered was radical in nature. Its unconventional structure was an act of rebellion against artistocratic tastes. By eliminating the traditional punctuation of music, Ives tried to capture the incoherent quality of the subconscious, and in this way Ives joined rebels in literature and the arts.

In contrast, the personal values of Ives were profoundly conservative. Despising the Bohemian life-style, he was committed to the genteel code of masculinity and the strenuous life. To him a business career was not a distraction but a necessary antidote to his artistic efforts. His music also contained traditional elements. He drew heavily on the sights and sounds of the small-town America that he knew as a boy. Patriotic themes and allusions are commonplace in his work. Charles Ives, like many Americans who reached maturity during the Progressive Period, was a curious mix of the residual values of the nineteenth century and the emergent beliefs of the twentieth century.

For Further Reading

The best biography is Frank Rossiter, Charles Ives and His America (New York, 1975). Vivian Perlis, Charles Ives Reconsidered: An Oral History (New Haven, 1974), contains the reminiscenses of many who knew the composer. Stuart Feder, "Decoration Day: A Boyhood Memory of Charles Ives," The Musical Quarterly, LXVI (April 1980), #2, is an article written by a psychiatrist who has an extensive knowledge of music.

* Entry under revision.