I met the 94 year old Slonimsky at a concert in L.A. in 1988, where he was accompanied by his stunning, red-headed teenage great-granddaughter. (They didn't look like that when I was young!) It was a program of Ives, Boulez and Varese conducted by Boulez himself. Zappa might have been there, but I didn't spot him.
Slonimsky once said that Charles Ives, “financed my entire career”. Ives, the son of a US Army bandleader in the Civil War, was known as a benefactor of other composers, though he often kept his financial support secret. In 1947, Ives won a Pulitzer Prize for Music and gave the prize money away, saying “prizes are for boys, and I’m all grown up”.
I loved the Charles Ives compositions I was exposed to as a kid, despite their difficulty to perform. The Circus Band march and variations on “America” were favorites, but the Fourth of July movement from his Holiday Symphony is truly awesome. As a lad I had a recording of it with Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic. Ives was the Frank Zappa of his day, Avant-garde, musically correct and an unquenchable sense of humor. His music was barely recognized during his lifetime.
He was an amazing character, an American icon and patriot often cited by Aaron Copeland as an influence. He was also heralded by conductor Bernard Herrmann, Arnold Schoenberg, William Schuman and Gustav Mahler.
Ives was also politically minded. In 1920, he proposed a 20th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which would authorize citizens to submit legislative proposals to Congress. In his proposal, members of Congress would review the submitted proposals, selecting 10 each year as referendums to be put to popular vote. He had a pamphlet printed at his own expense proclaiming a need to curtail “The effect of too much politics in our representative democracy”, but like his music the proposal was largely ignored during his lifetime.
In a bizarre twist, Ives stopped composing 27 years before his death in 1954. His wife, Mary said that one day in 1927 he came downstairs with tears in his eyes, saying he could compose no more, because “nothing sounds right.” It’s how I feel when I watch the nightly news.