Charles Ives saw music ‘as the lens through which we can glimpse the divine’

For him, that also shook up the universe.

The 150^th anniversary of the birth of the American maverick takes place Sunday, the 20^th, and despite his relative obscurity, he was a giant as an uncompromising modernist classical composer and as an innovative executive in the insurance industry.

Born in Connecticut and a graduate of Yale, Charles Ives’ musical transformation was certainly one of the most extraordinary cases in history, made all the more remarkable by the fact that he was forced to compose largely without hearing many of his adventurous works played by an orchestra or soloists until a half-century or more after their composition. Even the sonatas, songs, and chamber music suffered from widespread neglect.

As a matter of confession, I am quite fond of his music, from the wonderfully rich late-Romantic scores of his youth to the craggy, thorny modernist fireworks of only a few years later. I am among those who feel scandalized by the fact that this season orchestras aren’t playing even one of his symphonies in celebration, much less all four. Two of them did win Pulitzers, by the way, once they were finally aired, and riotous cheers often break out at the conclusion when the works are performed.

For a biographical overview of this American original, turn to my post, “Thoughts while listening to Charles Ives,” of November 5, 2013, at my blog, Chicken Farmer I still love you.

Today, I’m offering a Double Tendrils. Let’s start with ten quotations about music.

1. You goddamn sissy… when you hear strong masculine music like this, get up and use your ears like a man.
2. It is more important to keep the horse going hard than to always play the exact notes.
3. Please don’t try to make things nice! All the wrong notes are right. Just copy as I have – I want it that way.
4. In “thinking up” music, I usually have some kind of a brass band with wings on it in back of my mind.
5. The possibilities of percussion sounds, I believe, have never been fully realized.
6. There is more to a piece of music than meets the ear.
7. Music is the art of thinking with sounds.
8. Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair. Many sounds that we are used to do not bother us, and for that reason we are inclined to call them beautiful. Frequently, when a new or unfamiliar work is accepted as beautiful on its first hearing, its fundamental quality is one that tends to put the mind to sleep.
9. The beauty of music is that it can touch the depths of our souls without saying a single word.
10. Good music is not just heard; it is felt with every fiber of our being.

~*~

And here are ten Ives quotes about life itself.

1. The word “beauty” is as easy to use as the word “degenerate.” Both come in handy when one does or does not agree with you.
2. An apparent confusion, if lived with long enough, may become orderly … A rare experience of a moment at daybreak, when something in nature seems to reveal all consciousness, cannot be explained at noon. Yet it is part of the day’s unity.
3. Awards are merely the badges of mediocrity.
4. Every great inspiration is but an experiment – though every experiment, we know, is not a great inspiration.
5. Expression, to a great extent, is a matter of terms, and terms are anyone’s. The meaning of “God” may have a billion interpretations if there be that many souls in the world.
6. You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.
7. The fabric of existence weaves itself whole.
8. Vagueness is at times an indication of nearness to a perfect truth.
9. The humblest artist will not find true humility in aiming low — he must never be timid or afraid of trying to express that which he feels is far above his power to express, any more than he should be in breaking away, when necessary, from easy first sounds, or afraid of admitting that those half-truths the come to him at rare intervals, are half-true; for instance, that all art galleries contain masterpieces, which are nothing more than a history of art’s beautiful mistakes.
10. Most of the forward movements of life in general … have been the work of essentially religiously-minded people.