Listen to just about anything Charles Ives wrote—his symphonies, his songs, his monumental Concord Piano Sonata—and you may experience a range of simultaneous emotions: awe, nostalgia, exhilaration, but also perhaps bewilderment. Ives remains, in his 150th anniversary year, a notoriously difficult composer, often misunderstood, woefully underperformed. The time for reassessment, writes Joseph Horowitz in this issue, is now. Horowitz, both as a cultural historian and as a concert producer, has long championed Ives’s music. This year, he is co-curating a major interdisciplinary festival devoted to Ives, to be held at Indiana University from September 30 to October 8. Several leading artists will perform. In early September, we will continue our own Ives exploration, with a collection of essays on our website (theamericanscholar.org) by Princeton historian Allen C. Guelzo, Yale art historian Tim Barringer, and Indiana University musicologist J. Peter Burkholder.
What makes Ives such an original? Earlier American composers looked largely to the Germanic symphonic tradition for idioms to adapt and emulate. Ives, meanwhile, drew from his Danbury, Connecticut, boyhood. He recalled the sounds of brass bands, church choirs, crowds cheering loudly on a village green—haunting echoes of a New England past that he manipulated in harmonically and rhythmically complex ways. It was as inventive a mix of the vernacular and the modern as any composer had dared imagine. And yet, for most of his life, Ives struggled for recognition. It likely didn’t help that he worked in isolation. Or that he chose as his profession not music but the life-insurance business.
When Leonard Bernstein evangelized for Ives’s Second Symphony in the 1950s, it may have seemed as if the composer’s time had finally come. More recently, Michael Tilson Thomas and others have taken up the cause, but Ives’s pieces have never enjoyed a sustained presence on the concert stage. In his sesquicentennial year, we will have a chance to encounter his music anew, to understand his contributions to the American experience, to see him not as some mad genius outlier but as the rightful heir to the tradition established by the Transcendentalists, Melville, and Twain.
