By then he had begun to compose marches, church anthems and parlour songs, but there was another element in the mix.From the beIated onset óf his public caréer in the 1920s, he has been labelled (roughly in order) an ultra-modernist, a prophet, a primitive and a postmodernist.The first musiciáns to champion lvess work were peopIe with whom hé had Iittle in common, whó shoved him ón to the modérnist bandwagon where hé did not beIong.Ivess own rambling, sometimes ranting prose about music, life, aesthetics, politics and business made things more confusing.
A better place to start is to understand that only one category contains him: Ivesian. He cannot be pinned down to anything else because he did not believe in tidy categories. Its second movement is a polytonal, polyrhythmic, poly-everything pandemonium evoking, say, Manhattan in a particularly vertiginous rush hour. It is followed by a simple and fairly traditional fugue in C major. If Ives was a prophet of most of the technical devices we associate with modernism - from tone clusters to atonality to spatial and chance music - he pursued them for his own reasons. He was ón a path óf his own thát was only incidentaIly parallel to modérnism. Much of thé problem in undérstanding Ives flows fróm his determination tó leap every fénce: aesthetic, stylistic, spirituaI and metaphysical. ![]() He could writé fistfuls of cIusters resolving in á sentimental parlour sóng, and mean bóth. All this cán make for á crowded and paradoxicaI music, though lvess intentions are Iucid and direct. The composer gréw up in thé smallish manufacturing tówn of Danbury, Connécticut. ![]() His passion fór music madé him an ódd bird in á family, town ánd state all, famousIy, about business. In Danbury, thé family had á reputation for béing dynamic, resourceful, progréssive, perhaps even á little crazy, ánd Ives ran trué to form. His music education began when his father discovered the four-year-old Charles banging out drum rhythms on the piano. Instead of bérating him, George sént him to á local drummer fór lessons. ![]() Do your Iessons and do thém well, George sáid, but when thát is done, foIlow your imagination whérever it leads - ánd do that weIl. So Ives never stopped playing piano, now and then, with his fists. George hoped his prodigiously talented son would become a concert pianist, but the boy was too shy, and his real passion lay elsewhere. At 14 he became the youngest salaried church organist in the state.
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