America’s Greatest Innovator
Charles Ives’ genius is barely recognized today.
Like so much of the web, Medium is short on history. Writers here focus either on themselves or events happening now (or not very long before now). So I’m going to try, for a couple minutes, to take you out of the now.
Too often these days the word “innovation” is ascribed to modern figures—people like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. But innovation isn’t new. Even the kind of innovation Jobs was known for is as old as humanity. We won’t go back that far, though. We’ll just go back about thirty years.
It was 1982, and I was a wide-eyed student at The Juilliard School in New York City. Wide-eyed because Juilliard—and New York—was like drinking from a firehose to a young man from a small town in Virginia. I studied percussion, but spent a huge amount of time exploring music that, although categorized as classical, was anything but.
I had discovered the music of several 20th-century American composers including Henry Cowell, Samuel Barber, Vincent Persichetti…and the man who in my opinion towered above them all: Charles Ives. I spent hundreds of hours in the school’s music library, listening to Ives’ music and following the printed scores as I listened.
Every Ives piece was a challenge. His music is by turns sublime and raging, crystalline and jagged. Listening to Ives was like a surrealistic American dream, with fleeting fragments of church hymns and folk songs amidst sonic landscapes of dense tone clusters, blinding sunlight, and ethereal echoes. I couldn’t get enough of it. The more I listened, the more I heard—and the deeper it got.
At some point I began listening to what is likely his greatest work, the Piano Sonata No.2, or the “Concord” Sonata. To this day, more than any other piece of music I’ve ever heard (including works by Stravinsky and Bartok, two other early 20th-century giants), Ives’ Concord Sonata keeps revealing its secrets.
I listened to the Concord Sonata obsessively, day and night, on my Sony Walkman—a portable cassette tape player (which was all the rage in 1982). I actually killed two of those devices from constantly rewinding the tape to listen to a passage repeatedly, trying to untangle what Ives was doing. In four vast movements, each based on a major figure of New England transcendentalism, Ives constructed a masterpiece that spanned both past and future centuries of music.
Born in 1874, Charles Ives was primed for genius at an early age. His father George was a Civil War band leader and a versatile multi-instrumentalist. Not much is known about George, who in many ways is an even greater enigma than his son Charlie. We know this by Ives’ accounts of music lessons with his father, which were—for the time—incredibly innovative. George would, for example, ask Charlie to try to play a song like “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the piano in one key while singing it in a different key.
This is what today we call bitonality, and was decades ahead of what any other late 19th-century composer on earth was doing—with the possible exception of the French impressionist composers Debussy and Ravel. Young Charlie Ives had an extraordinary sense of hearing and appreciation for sound, because not only did he engage in deliberate bitonality at the piano, he also described hearing it in the town square on holidays—when two different bands played different tunes on opposite sides of the square.
To Ives, the world around him was a constant symphony. No sound, however faint, escaped his attention. From the distant echoes of church bells, to the quiet hissing of leaves in the wind, to hymns sung at a camp meeting. His towering innovation was recreating those sounds in his music—not in some vague, suggestive, pleasant-sounding way—but literally. He’d use techniques like playing the black keys on a piano with a ruler in his right hand to create quiet tone clusters…while playing a peaceful melody in a different key with his left.
Ives focused on rhythm as well—the overlapping, lopsided rhythms of a horse’s hooves juxtaposed against the clink of a blacksmith’s hammer, both at different tempos. He recreated these sounds in his music, notating difficult polyrhythms like groups of five against groups of three. If you look at the photo of his studio above, you’ll see two metronomes on the piano. Though we don’t know for certain, I’m pretty sure Ives would get both of them going at different tempos to study and notate polyrhythms.
Ives believed our ears were no different than any muscle in our bodies, and needed exercise to make them strong. He believed that listening to safe, popular, pleasant-sounding music was the aural equivalent of lounging on a couch—and didn’t help our ears one bit.
One fall weekend in 1982, when I was a student at Juilliard, I decided to make a pilgrimage to Danbury and West Redding, Connecticut—the birthplace and later country home of Charles Ives, respectively.
As I drove away from the city, I thought about the double life Ives led. A Yale graduate, Ives entered the insurance business—where he remained for the rest of his life. While it’s easy to assume Ives had a business career because he knew he’d never make a penny from his music, it’s obvious he relished the challenges of insurance as much as composing.
Ives attacked the unique challenge of betting against people’s misfortune with the same revolutionary genius evident in his music. He became well-known in the insurance industry for, among other things, creating the foundation for what became modern estate planning. But he kept all this completely separate from his life as one of the world’s greatest composers. Many of his business colleagues were surprised to hear of his musical life.
As the endless suburbs faded into rolling Connecticut countryside, I thought about a contemporary of Ives, the poet Wallace Stevens. I doubt either of these men knew the other, but they had so much in common it’s hard not to think they were both put on Earth together for the same reason.
Like Ives, Stevens led a double life as an insurance executive and poet. And like Ives, Stevens lived in Connecticut. Most fascinating, though, is how the poetry of Wallace Stevens is an almost perfect mirror of the music of Ives. Just as Ives experimented with dense harmonies, dissonance and bitonalism in his attempts to reproduce the sounds of everyday life, Stevens’ experimented with wild juxtapositions, abstract metaphors and exotic imagery.
The opening stanzas of Stevens’ great poem Sea Surface full of Clouds drifted through my mind:
—
In that November off Tehuantepec,
The slopping of the sea grew still one night
And in the morning summer hued the deck
And made one think of rosy chocolate
And gilt umbrellas. Paradisal green
Gave suavity to the perplexed machine
Of ocean, which like limpid water lay.
Who, then, in that ambrosial latitude
Out of the light evolved the morning blooms,
Who, then, evolved the sea-blooms from the clouds
Diffusing balm in that Pacific calm?
C’était mon enfant, mon bijou, mon âme.
—
When I got to West Redding, where Charles and his coincidentally-named wife Harmony had a country home, I had no idea where to find it. So I began looking for locals to ask. I wasn’t too surprised and a little sad when nobody even knew who Charles Ives was—much less that he had lived there.
Finally, after following a few blind leads, I found an old woman who was able to tell me where the house was on Umpawaug Road. When I pulled over by the gravel driveway, there was nothing to indicate one of the world’s greatest composers lived there. Just trees, wind, tall grass, and a gravel path winding away into the distance.
I walked up the driveway, realizing I was technically trespassing but determined not to have come all this way for nothing. A few dozen more steps, and there it was, just as I had seen it in the biographies of Ives—a simple yet beautiful shake-sided house with large windows and a trellis.
Nobody appeared to be home, so I walked up to the front door and knocked to be sure. When there was no answer, I walked around to the side of the house, trying my best not to look suspicious. Suddenly I recognized the porch where Ives sat with Henry Cowell in a well-known photograph:
And adjacent to the porch, a large window. I stepped quietly onto the porch and pressed my nose into the glass to see inside. There before me was Ives’ studio, seemingly untouched since he had last sat at the upright piano. It was as if he might walk through the door at any moment. I was awed. Somewhere in the distance a meadowlark called.
A few hours later my search repeated itself as I tried to find Ives’ burial site in Danbury’s Wooster Cemetery. When I finally found his simple tombstone, the only sign that a person of greatness lay beneath it was a single red rose on the stone. Engraved in the stone was this simple line from Psalm 108:
Awake psaltery and harp: I myself will awake quite early.
What haunts me about Charles Ives is the fact that one day in 1927, at the age of 52, he stopped composing for good. According to his wife Harmony, he came downstairs with tears in his eyes, and said “Nothing sounds right anymore.” I’ve thought a lot about what happened that day to Ives and why. Nobody really knows. He had, up to that point, suffered a few heart attacks (and recovered from them all); the fact that he lived ‘til 1954 suggests his health wasn’t bad.
I sometimes wonder if he’d suffered a stroke that affected his sense of hearing? Maybe it was a loss of motivation, the result of his music having gone all but ignored for decades? He clearly had the strength of character to do what he loved without validation from others, but maybe he just arrived at an existential dead-end, where his muse simply said “Screw it all.”
One thing is certain: his genius was extraordinary. Music historians generally recognize this today, although a few stubbornly refuse to grant Ives the kind of acclaim reserved for the likes of Debussy or Stravinsky, suggesting that Ives was an accomplished amateur. But this idea is absurd—driven by the fact that music wasn’t Ives’ vocation, but something he did on evenings and weekends.
Ives was one of the greatest innovators in American history, but most people don’t know it, because the word “innovation” seems largely reserved these days for technology. I’ll just put it this way: if Ives was a scientist or engineer, we’d probably be enjoying nuclear fusion power and flying cars today.
