A Connecticut Yankee Fifty Years Later

Phi Kappa Phi Forum, Fall 2004 by Thurmaier, David

In my previous columns, I focused on two topics that have fascinated me for some time: the development of American music and the importance of contemporary music. Part of my interest in these topics stems from my work studying the composer Charles Ives (1874-1954), whose music is American and in many ways still seems contemporary. This year provides us with a chance to reconsider Ives's legacy given that he died fifty years ago. Indeed, this anniversary has stimulated a renewed interest in Ives; for example, the New York Philharmonic held a two-week festival in May entitled "Charles Ives: An American Original in Context," during which the orchestra performed many of Ives's most influential works side by side with those of his experimental contemporaries such as Debussy, Berg, and Varèse. Additionally, recent articles about Ives by such notable critics and writers as Richard Taruskin (in the New York Times) and Alex Ross (in the New Yorker) prod those of us who appreciate and enjoy Ives's music to consider Ives from fresh perspectives. In light of this exciting activity, I thought it would be a good exercise for me to express my own thoughts on Ives's music and what it means for us in 2004.

If there were any truth in the adage that art imitates life, then the music of Charles Ives should be as colorful as his remarkable life. His father, George, was a Civil War band-master whose fine musical abilities reportedly inspired a laudatory discussion between Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. Lincoln remarked that George's First Connecticut Heavy Artillery band was a "good band," to which Grant replied, "It's the best band in the army, they tell me." George Ives was not the typical father; he was known as something of a ne'er-do-well who cavorted around Danbury, Connecticut, with his trumpet, leading dueling marching bands up and down Main Street. George instilled two important characteristics in his son Charles: a respect and love for American traditions and a willingness to experiment and question the "rules." In his memoirs, Ives recalls several experiences in which George would ask young Charles to do such tasks as performing songs in different keys simultaneously and playing pianos set in unorthodox tuning systems - George insisted that these activities "stretched the ear." Throughout his life, Ives never lost his penchant for experimentation, even when he argued with his more conservative teachers at Yale, where he received a music degree in 1898.

When music as a career lost its luster for reasons that included the death of his father, feelings that his creativity was stifled by numerous rules and regulations, and the promise of financial stability outside of music, Ives turned to another field entirely. He started work at an insurance company in New York after graduation and eventually co-founded his own highly successful company. The tremendous diversity of his musical output is even more remarkable when one considers that he held a full-time job for more than twenty years, finding time to compose only at nights and on the weekends. Yet this arrangement allowed Ives the freedom to compose music how he wished, without pressures from society patrons demanding a certain type of musical work.

Being a composer in the first part of the twentieth century must have been challenging for Ives and his contemporaries. In his book Remaking the Past, Joseph Straus points out that "music composed in the first half of the twentieth century is permeated by the music of the past.... Traditional sonorities, forms, and musical gestures pervade even works that seem stylistically most progressive." In other words, no matter how experimental Ives may have been, his music was still inevitably infused with idioms from earlier music. While it is generally agreed that Ives's music was progressive for its time, one is struck by the constant reminders of the past found interspersed throughout his output.

So why should we still care about this conflicted Connecticut Yankee? In short, because his music still matters and because it depicts American culture and life with a great passion and profundity. I think that Ives's talent for weaving elements of the past and present into his music reflects a quality found in many of us. How many times have you yearned for something in your past or expressed a longing for the "good old days," but then realized that it makes more sense to focus on the present and future? I believe that this duality was an ever-present dilemma throughout Ives's life. The historian Robert Crunden describes this phenomenon as "innovative nostalgia" - someone who forges new ground in his or her area while maintaining a strong sense of the past. Much is made of Ives's progressive musical contributions, which are certainly noteworthy, but behind that veneer of modernity his music portrays the quality of life in a nineteenth-century New England town. Interestingly, Ives bemoaned the encroachment of modern technology and what he perceived as a loss of tradition, while at the same time he wrote music that would take many years to find an audience and still leaves some people befuddled.