Early 20th Century American Composer Charles Ives (1874 – 1954) was the Wallace Stevens of Music. Ives was a Yale man (studying with Horatio Parker) who supported himself as a successful insurance executive for Ives and Myrick where he was instrumental in crafting life insurance packages that were considered the precursors of modern estate planning. Born in Danbury, Connecticut, Ives was the son of a military band leader, George Ives. The elder Ives began his son’s musical training, encouraging his son to have an open minded attitude toward music theory. Charles Ives certainly took that to heart.
Ives produced an impressive body of work in his lifetime that was not noticed until after the composer died. Ives was fond of juxtaposing keys in songs and pitting brass bands against one another playing different songs in different keys. This led to Ives’ pronounced use of dissonance in his music, contributing to its challenge to the listener according to several critics.
Ives was intensely interested in the American music of hymns, marches, and of composers like Stephen Foster. Ives readily incorporated familiar American themes in his music, often in surprising and disconcerting ways. Never far from the spirit of his father, Ives composed for the brass marching band. Among his most famous compositions was his “Variations on ‘America’.” There is little more American than a brass band playing “America.”
This collection by The President’s Own United States Marine Band readily shows Ives Stars and Stripes. Ives chose many themes to expound on, including fraternity songs (“Omega Lambda Chi”), college songs (“Here's to Good Old Yale”), and extrapolations of his orchestral (“Decoration Day”) and piano (“The Alcotts”) music.
A caution to those expecting John Philip Souza... don’t, Ives was America’s singular concert music voice who took the music of Sousa and made it in his own image and in the bargain captured perfectly that American spirit of multi-tasking polyculture. Ives better than most other composers captured in his tonal pallet the sound of America in all of its glorious dissonance, ending finally in a beautiful consonance.
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