Charles Ives
This photo from around 1913 shows Ives in
his "day job". He was the director of a suc-
cessful insurance agency.
Charles Edward Ives (October 20, 1874 –
May 19, 1954) was an American modernist[1]
composer. He is widely regarded as one of
the first American composers of international
significance. Ives’ music was largely ignored
during his life, and many of his works went
unperformed for many years. Over time, Ives
came to be regarded as an "American Origin-
al";[2] Ives 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 pro-
gram of experimental music, with musical
techniques
including
polytonality,
poly-
rhythm, tone clusters, aleatoric elements,
and quarter tones,[3] thus foreshadowing vir-
tually every major musical innovation of the
20th century.
Sources of Charles Ives’s tonal imagery
are hymn tunes and traditional songs, the
town band at holiday parade, the fiddlers at
Saturday night dances, patriotic songs, senti-
mental parlor ballads, and the melodies of
Stephen Foster.
Biography
Charles Ives, ca. 1889
Charles Ives was born in Danbury, Connectic-
ut, the son of George Ives, a U.S. Army
bandleader in the American Civil War, and
his wife Mary Parmelee. A strong influence of
Charles’s may have been sitting in the Dan-
bury town square, listening to his father’s
marching band and other bands on other
sides of the square simultaneously. George
Ives’s unique music lessons were also a
strong influence on Charles; George Ives took
an open-minded approach to musical theory,
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Charles Ives
1
encouraging his son to experiment in bitonal
and polytonal harmonizations. It was from his
father that Charles Ives also learned the mu-
sic of Stephen Foster.[4] Ives became a
church organist at the age of 14[5] and wrote
various hymns and songs for church services,
including his Variations on ’America’ .[6] Ives
moved to New Haven in 1893, enrolling in
the Hopkins School wh