CHARLES IVES American Composer (1874-1954) Charles Ives free midi download

CHARLES IVES
20^thOctober 1874 --- 19^thMay 1954

Charles Ives was born in 1874, Danbury, Conn, U.S. died in 1954, New York City, significant American composer who is known for a
number of innovations that anticipated most of the later musical developments of the 20th century.

Ives had received his earliest musical instruction from his father, who was a bandleader, music teacher, and acoustician who was
experimented with the sound of quarter tones. At 12 Charles played organ in a church, and two years later his first composition
was played by the town band. In 1893 or 1894 he composed Song for the Harvest Season, in which the four parts for voice
trumpet, violin, and organ-were in different keys. That year he began studying at Yale University under Horatio Parker, then the
foremost academic composer in the United States. His unconventionality disconcerted Parker for whom Ives eventually turned out
a series of "correct" compositions.

After graduation in 1898, Ives became an insurance clerk and part-time organist in New York City. In 1907 he founded the highly
successful insurance partnership of Ives & Myrick, which he headed from 1916 to 1930. He devised the insurance concept of estate
planning and considered his years in business a valuable human experience that contributed to the substance of his music. Nearly
all his works were written before 1915 many lay unpublished until his death. Chronic diabetes and a hand tremor eventually forced
him to give up composing and to retire from business. His music became widely known only in the last years of his life. In 1947 he
received the Pulitzer Prize for his Third Symphony The Camp Meeting, composed 1904-11. His Second Symphony (1897-1902) was
first performed in its entirety 50 years after its composition.

Ives's music is intimately related to the American culture and experience, especially that of New England. His compositions with
integrated quotations from many popular tunes, revival hymns, barn dances, and classical European music are frequently works of
enormous complexity that freely employ sharp dissonance, polytonal harmonies and polymetric constructions. He drew from mostly
European music what techniques he wished while experimenting with tone clusters, microtonal intervals and elements of chance in
music (in one bassoon part he directs the player to play whatever he wants beyond a specific point). Believing that all sound is
potential music, he was somewhat of an iconoclast and occasionally a parodist.

Unanswered Question composed before 1908 a string quartet or string orchestra repeats simple harmonies placed apart from them
a trumpet reiterates a question-like theme that is dissonantly and confusedly commented upon by flutes (optionally with an oboe
or a clarinet). In the second movement of Three Places in New England (also titled First Orchestral Set and A New England
Symphony, 1903-14), the music gives the effect of two bands approaching and passing each other, each playing its own melody in
its own key, tempo, and rhythm. His monumental Second Piano Sonata (subtitled Concord, Mass, 1840-60), which was written
from 1909 to 1915 and first performed in 1938, echoes the spirit of the New England Transcendentalists in its four sections
"Emerson, "Hawthorne," "The Alcotts," and "Thoreau." It contains tone clusters, quotes Beethoven, and includes a flute obbligato
honouring Thoreau's wish to hear a flute over Walden. The mood of the sonata ranges from wild and dissonant to idyllic and the
mystical. It was published in 1920, together with Ives's pamphlet Essays Before a Sonata.

Ives conceived his Second String Quartet (1911-13) and composition on second movement which begun in 1907 as a conversation,
political argument and reconciliation among four men it is full of quotations from hymns, marches, and Beethoven, Brahms, and
Tchaikovsky. His Variations on America (1891; additions before 1894) is the earliest polytonal piece known. In one of his piano and
violin sonatas, he adds a passage for trumpet. His 114 Songs (1919-24) for voice and piano vary from ballads to satire, hymns and
protest songs and romantic songs. In technique they range from highly complex, e.g. with tone clusters, polytonality and atonality
to straightforward and simple.

Other compositions include Central Park in the Dark (1906), for chamber orchestra, General William Booth Enters into Heaven
(1914, to Vachel Lindsay's poem), for soloist or choir and band but also performed in arrangements for chamber orchestra and for
voice and piano and the four-part symphony A Symphony, New England Holidays ("Washington's Birthday", 1909, rescored 1913
Decoration Day, 1912, "Fourth of July," 1912-13; and "Thanksgiving and Forefathers' Day," 1904). The Ives manuscripts were given
to the Library of the Yale School of Music by his wife, Harmony Ives, in 1955, and a temporary mimeographed catalog was compiled
from 1954 to 1960 by pianist John Kirkpatrick.

The standard biography of Ives is Charles Ives and His Music (1955), by Henry and Sidney Cowell. Charles Ives Remembered, by
Vivian Perlis, was published in 1974.
Copyright 1994-1998 Encyclopaedia Britannica
Last Updated on 2017
By Steven Ritchie

And now for the Music

Thanks to Welton Barker for the music below.
(435)"The Unanswered Question". Sequenced by Welton Barker

(1252)"Circus". Sequencer Unknown

(780)"They Are There!". Sequencer Unknown

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