Music: Radical from Connecticut

Arnold Schoenberg, himself a revolutionary composer when Ives’s music was more respected than played, thought his adopted country was overlooking a native genius. “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.”

There are some who now argue that Charles Edward Ives is the finest com poser the U.S. has produced. But back in 1945, when Schoenberg singled him out, Ives was a name only to a handful of professionals, though he had anticipated Schoenberg’s experiments in atonality by two decades. Not until two years later did really popular recognition begin to even the score. When Ives got the 1947 Pulitzer Prize (for a composition that lay unplayed in his West Redding, Conn, barn for more than 40 years), he was already 72. Last week, when the first American recording of his Second Symphony, performed by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, was released by Columbia, the old man had been dead for six years.

The Second Symphony is less radical than many of Ives’s works. A passionate, lyrical piece, it contains unmistakable echoes of the great German romantics—Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner—but positioned neatly after their Olympian periods are Ives’s variations on Turkey in the Straw, Columbia the Gem of the Ocean, even that old Dartmouth drinking song, Where, Oh Where, Are the Pea-Green Freshmen? After passages of spacious solemnity, the horns break suddenly into a capering phrase from Camptown Races; in the midst of the frenzied final movement, doleful woodwinds sound forth with Old Black Joe. Even the ending is typically Ivesian: the entire orchestra comes in with a raucous, jeering cluster of chords.

Ragtime Rhythms. Born in Danbury, Conn. Ives got his early musical training from his father, who was a bandmaster in General Grant’s army.* The elder Ives was an inveterate experimenter with sound: to get new group effects he would place part of his band on the village green in Danbury, part in a church steeple, and the rest on the roof of a house on Main Street, inviting them all to play together. By the time young Charles Ives got to Yale, he was already shocking his instructors with his own experiments on weird harmonies and erratic rhythms.

Although an early admirer of Wagner (“Richie Wagner did get away occasionally from doh, me, so,” he wrote, “which was more than some others did”), Ives realized that he himself could not express what he wanted to say within the romantic tradition. Long before Schoenberg, Stravinsky and other modernists, he experimented with ragtime rhythms and dissonance. A practical man, he also recognized that there was no public for that kind of music, and he was far too inde pendent to try to change his style. Some time before he married his wife, Harmony, he decided that rather than “starve on dissonances” he would go into the insurance business. He worked first as a clerk at Mutual Life, later helped found the firm of Ives & Myrick, which by the time of his retirement in 1930 was the largest insurance agency in the nation. Ives saw no conflict between the life of a businessman and the life of a composer: “The fabric of existence weaves itself whole. You cannot set an art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality and substance. My work in music helped my business and my work in business helped my music.”

Double Life. Until ill health forced his retirement (a nervous disorder affected his hearing so that high-pitched notes came through to him tremulous and distorted), Ives led a demanding double life: he composed on weekends, during his lunch hours and en route from New York to his weekend retreat in Connecticut. Somehow, he turned out a tremendous quantity of work, only a fraction of which has survived (five symphonies, some violin and piano music, more than 120 songs, and the fine choral work, Lincoln the Great Commoner).

Charles Ives had so little hope of his music’s being performed that he scrawled most of his scores in pencil, then stuffed them haphazardly in bureau drawers or discarded them. As his health failed, he composed less and less (most of his major works were written before 1920) and withdrew increasingly from the outside world. He rarely would see visitors at his house in West Redding, never read a newspaper, refused to own either a radio or a phonograph. He was not even aware that in Europe, Schoenberg and his disciples were creating a new musical language, having independently attempted many of the experiments that Ives had performed so long before. But gradually, word of Ives’s work spread among musicians, and his difficult compositions began to be heard. An astounded Paris critic summed up his achievement: “Charles Ives seems to have created, before the Sacre du Printemps, a style which by its audacities places its author among the pioneers of music.”

* It was at an Ives band concert that Grant made his famous reply to Lincoln when asked if he enjoyed the music: “I can’t tell,” he said. “I know two tunes; one is Yankee Doodle and the other isn’t. Which one did the band play?”