Charles Ives

One might say Charles Ives was the most original and most radical, and arguably the greatest, of the American composers of art music. One might also say that he was one of the most innovative figures in music history because he is named America’s first major composer.
Charles was born in Danbury, Connecticut on October 20, 1874. His father was George Ives, a bandleader in the Union Army who had served with General Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War. George gave his son Charles a highly unorthodox musical education by European standards.
It was not an option to learn of the three B’s – Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. He received much instruction in harmony and counterpoint (counterpoint being the harmonious opposition of two or more independent musical lines). He would also be given lessons on the violin, piano, organ, cornet, and drums.
Most importantly young Ives was taught how to “stretch his ears,” as he said. This method of instruction would play a HUGE part in the progression of Ives’ creative composing. In order to practice “stretching his ears,” He was made to sing a song called “Swanee River” in the key of Eb while his father accompanied him on the piano in the key of C – this was a useful lesion in polytonality.
Since his ancestors had attended Yale it was expected for young Charles to enroll in the same University to study music. He took courses in music from a composer who studies in Germany. His name was Horatio Parker. Because of Ives young, independent ideas about how music should sound, these ideas clashed with Parker’s traditional European training in harmony and counterpoint. Ives opted to leave his experimental musical ideas out of the classroom and express his musical creativity in extracurricular musicals and things of that nature. He graduated with the class of 1898 with a maintained D+ average in grades. He did not pursue music as a profession because he realized that the people of his time would not pay money to hear the music he would create.
Instead of pursuing music he headed to New York and Wall Street. In 1907 Ives and a friend formed the company Ives and Myrick, an insurance agency that became the largest company in the United States. Long hours of work and spare-time composing caused an undermined to his health and in 1918 he had a heart attack. This decline in health caused Ives to think of retirement. Upon retirement in 1930 the company had sales of $49 million. So Ives had been a millionaire for sometime before he retired.
He was a modernist of the most extreme; given the time period he lived in.
Ives devised radical, compositional techniques and was the first composer to use polytonality extensively. Polytonality is the simultaneous sounding of two or more keys. This would make pieces of music sound distorted or cause tonal clashed and the tune would seem out of phase with other tune’s. He also experimented with quarter-tone music - music in which the smallest interval is not the chromatic half step but half of a half step. Ives would always take the familiar and “defamiliarize” it - making the old, sound very modern.
The Three Places in New England (Orchestral Set No. 1) is a composition for orchestra by Charles Ives. It was composed across a long span of time (sketches date back from 1903, while the latest revisions were made in 1929), however the bulk was written between 1911 and 1914. Three Places consists of three movements in Ives’ preferred slow-fast-slow movement order:

I. The "St. Gaudens" in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and his Colored Regiment)
II. Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut
III. 'The Housatonic River at Stockbridge

The three movements are ordered with the longest first and the shortest last, and a complete performance of the piece lasts eighteen or nineteen minutes.
The piece has become one of Ives' most commonly performed compositions. It showcases most of the signature traits of his style: layered textures, with multiple, simultaneous melodies, many of which are recognizable hymn and marching tunes; masses of sound, and tone clusters; and sudden, sharp textural contrasts.
Each of the three movements is named for a place in New England. Each is carefully composed to make the listener feel as though he or she is at that very place, experiencing its unique atmosphere. Ives’ use of paraphrasing American folk tunes is particularly important in creating such an effect, as it provides the listener with some sort of tangible reference point from which to access the music. In this way, Ives makes the music accessible even though it makes heavy use of chromatics which, at the time of its writing, was seen as an advanced trait.
Ives' music was largely ignored during his lifetime as an active composer, but since then his reputation has greatly increased.
Although Charles Ives had brought his work to completion long before his death in the spring of 1954, it is still largely unknown to the American musical public. Some do not even know his name; others have heard of him as a composer from professional musicianship; still others have gained an impression when some of his work had a public performance.
For all of the obscurity and neglect that followed this man no one would argue of what an enigmatic composer he was and how difficult it was to understand and explain many of his works.