A great deal of Ives's later and more innovative music also echoes his childhood. 2 shows the teenager's grasp of traditional popular genres and his lifelong propensity for weaving familiar tunes into his work: it quotes "A Song of a Gambolier." The Circus Band, from the 1890s, rivals some of Sousa's as a classic march of the era, enlivened with Ives's characteristic rhythmic quirks. Early works include the precocious Variations on "America" for organ, written at seventeen it would find considerable popularity after Ives died. He began composing at around age thirteen, his first pieces little marches, fiddle tunes, songs for church, and the like: the kind of thing he heard and played around Danbury all the time.
In short, Ives was something of a prodigy, and reached adulthood as one of the finest American organists of his generation.
#CHARLES IVES MUSIC MATH FULL#
One summer day at age fifteen, he played outfield for his baseball team in the afternoon and that night played a full organ recital. Though he worked at music with remarkable discipline for his age, he also resented the demands of his training: "As a boy I was partially ashamed of it.When other boyswere out driving grocery carts, or doing chores, or playing ball, I felt all wrong to stay in and play piano." Needing an antidote to the isolation and social anomaly of an intense education in music, Charlie threw himself into sports. Instead, Charlie specialized in the organ, and by age fourteen he had become the youngest salaried church organist in Connecticut. For some years George hoped his son would find a career as a concert pianist. Thus the invention of what a later age would call "tone clusters."Īfter receiving his first instruction in piano and other instruments from his father, Charlie was turned over to more advanced keyboard teachers. Charlie never did stop using his fists on the piano, and was eventually notorious for requiring a board to play the Concord Sonata.
#CHARLES IVES MUSIC MATH HOW TO#
Rather than saying, as would most parents, That's not how to play the piano, George observed instead, "It's all right to do that, Charles, if you know what you're doing," and sent the boy down the street for drum lessons. George Ives's response gave the first impetus to his son's career as a musical innovator. Ives told the story of his introduction to music: his father came home one day to find the five-year old banging out the Ives Band's drum parts on the piano, using his fists. Still, his family was prominent, noted for extravagant personalities and (except for George) a gift for business. That situation, which would have been the same in most American towns in the 19th century, had its impact on Charles Ives. Yet while Danbury prided itself during the 1880s in being called "the most musical town in Connecticut" (that in large part due to George Ives's labors), people still viewed the profession with little understanding or respect. When the war ended George had returned to Danbury to take up the unusual trade, in that business-oriented town, of musician.Īs a cornet player, band director, theater orchestra leader, choir director, and teacher, George Ives became the most influential musician in the region. During the Civil War his father George Ives had been the Union's youngest bandmaster, his band called the best in the army. And perhaps only there could such an isolated, paradoxical figure make himself into a major artist.Ĭharles Ives was born in the small manufacturing town of Danbury, Connecticut, on October 20, 1874, two years before Brahms finished his First Symphony. The way in which Ives pursued his goal of a democratic art, and his career of creating at the highest level of ambition while making a fortune in the life insurance business, perhaps could only have happened in the United States. The result, in his most far-reaching work, is like nothing ever imagined before him: music at once unique and as familiar as a tune whistled in childhood, music that can conjure up the pandemonium of a small-town Fourth of July or the quiet of a New England church, music of visionary spirituality built from the humblest materials: an old gospel hymn, a patriotic tune, a sentimental parlor song. Optimistic, idealistic, fiercely democratic, he unified the voice of the American people with the forms and traditions of European classical music. For all his singularity, the Yankee maverick Charles Ives is among the most representative of American artists.
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