Classical Mysic Ping: Ives Rocks!
The Ives songs for piano and voice are some of the most haunting and difficult to perform/comprehend in the literature of the time.
THanks for posting this. There aren’t many american composers of his generation that reach his level of complexity and uniqueness. He is barely known in europe though.
...and that is Europe’s loss. Ives’ music is unique - his is not ‘linear’ in the way that most European art music is, even the difficult twelve-tone stuff and so one. Ives tried to write a music much based on ‘the voice of the people’, true democrat (in the American sense, not the liberal one); he could start with the mental image of an American feast day, or even a ship disaster, and then proceed with jotting down what occurred in his head by association... the sound of alarm bells ringing, all kinds of folks in all directions talking upset, general upheaval (in the case of a calamity), or contrariwise, with the merry sound image of children singing, interspersed with different folk tunes and standards played by numerous marching bands present at the feast. It all seems to happen simultaneously, as it does in real life (Ives disliked precious decorum), like when you try to direct your attention to everything that is happening around you at a carnival. That he really succeeded to transform all those impressions into revolutionary classical music is his triumph... and I do not know one other composer over the ages that achieved this. Compared to Ives, Frank Zappa was an amateur, and one with lots of profanity and filth to boot.
Just in Europe? On a name recognition test I'll bet only about one percent of Americans know who he was. But then again any classical composer of this century would only get little more than one to ten percent of Americans knowing who they were. I can't say that I love his music, but I thought his piece on the circus was very interesting.