Classical
United States
Charles Ives
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About Charles Ives
Hometown
Danbury, CT, United States
Born
1874
Genre
Classical
The founding father of the American musical avant-garde, Charles Ives composed uncompromising and grand-scale works that still sound radical. He was born in 1874 in Danbury, CT, with an unorthodox creative imagination that flourished in childhood with the encouragement of his father, a former Civil War bandleader and music teacher. After his graduation from Yale and a stint as a church organist in New York City, Ives made his career in insurance, eventually opening his own business and earning enough to compose without financial concerns. Eschewing the European musical models then favored by American composers, Ives juxtaposed snippets of folk music, marches, hymns, ragtime, and more with moments of firebrand experimentalism in his compositions. His music often cross-fades between scenes, vacillating between folksy themes and queasy polytonal collages. He generally used avant-garde techniques programmatically, either to evoke scenes and locales from different points in his life or to play a dramatic role in meditations on philosophical themes—such as in his 1908 chamber orchestral piece, The Unanswered Question, which features two separate ensembles and a solo trumpet playing at divergent tempos. Most of his major pieces are orchestral, including his heavily quotational suite Three Places in New England and his four symphonies; several of his art songs and the sprawling, transcendentalism-inspired Piano Sonata No. 2 (The Concord Sonata) are also among his finest achievements. Several experimental techniques that Ives pioneered—including microtonality, indeterminacy, and spatial music—flourished long after his death in 1954.
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