Composer Ives Biography

The United States Father of American music Dodecafonia, Polyrhythmia, Polystilism, Sound clusters, Aleatoric, he successfully tested all this long before Schounberg, Stravinsky, Stokhausen and other great authors of the last century. It all started with children's impressions: his father, a capeist of the city orchestra, George Ives once forced two orchestras, each of whom played his music, marching towards each other.

Perhaps, already at that moment, young Charles first tried dissonance and has since carefully experimented with him. He saved the impression of the music of the two orchestras for life. The young man receives professional musical education at Yale University, where he studies from the most famous composer in America Horatio Parker. These four years of study were perhaps the most fruitful: it creates about 80 works, including the first symphony, which became its thesis.

But at the end of the University, Ives goes to the insurance business. He organizes his own company, makes innovations in the field of real estate insurance and still novice agents in America are studying by its development. Success in business allow him to keep his family without problems. But he is engaged in music in his free time. Ives does nothing to promote his own creativity and calls himself an amateur.

I really did not compose at all. I just cleaned the house. And everything that remains was hanging on a linen rope, ”the composer said. Then he did not know that a little time would pass, and he would be called the father of American music of the twentieth century. I discovered a new understanding of America in it, ”said Igor Stravinsky. Ives gave the essay for more than 30 years and only in the year he published several works.

The actual-composer is truly opened only at the end of the 10s. Then it is found that he tested many methods of the latest musical letter in the era of late romanticism. His music becomes a sensation. Arnold Schönberg admires the work of the American, Ives receives the Pulitzer Prize for the Third Symphony, Leonard Bernstein conducts the second symphony of the composer, the pianist John Kirkpatrik performs his grandiose sonata Concorde.

Igor Stravinsky writes: "Ives began to bite the current pie long before someone managed to sit down to this table." But Glory comes too late: the composer is already seriously ill and does not compose music for many years. During his creative life, Charles Ives wrote six symphonies, the Cantata “Heavenly Country”, string quartets, five sonatas for violin and piano, many chamber works for different compositions, a collection of “songs” ...

The last major plan of Ives - “World” Symphony - suggested the location of orchestras and choir in the open, in different points of space.

Two parts of the symphony of the Earth and the music of the sky should have sounded simultaneously, but twice, so that listeners could alternately fix attention on each. Text: Tatyana Timofeeva.