Well over a century after Ives began composing his epochal works that challenged the mainstream tenants of musical composition, and over a half century after his death, he has remained a unique character in the history of American music. A true “Connecticut Yankee” in every way, after a thorough grounding in a traditional academic musical education at Yale, he sought to create an authentic “American” musical style in his compositions. His childhood in Danbury, Connecticut—his father led the local marching band—was lived in a musical atmosphere of marching bands, church hymns, popular songs, folksongs, patriotic songs: every kind of music a young man could experience in a small, late nineteenth-century American town.
He began his musical interests early, playing snare drum in his father’s band, and ultimately became a fine organist by his teenage years, playing professionally in church. Musical compositions appeared early on, including songs and chamber music. He loved sports equally with music, and thoroughly enjoyed playing baseball. During his attendance at Yale, he was a stalwart on the varsity football team, while assiduously mastering the school’s music curriculum. The latter was famously led by one of the country’s early, distinguished academic composers and pedagogues, Horatio Parker. Upon his graduation, he entered the insurance business, moving to New York City. He soon rose to prominence in the profession, starting his own insurance firm, and is recognized today as a central figure in devising modern principles of marketing insurance and establishing our contemporary precepts of estate planning. He was active as an insurance executive until ill health led to his retirement in 1930.
But, all along the way he found time to compose, and to reflect deeply upon fundamental philosophies and procedures of music composition. He composed in obscurity, and many of his works were not performed for decades, even after their publication or after his death in 1954. In fact, many of his colleagues were surprised later to find out that he had composed at all. He stopped composing completely in 1928. But, little by little, musical luminaries, such as Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, Nicolas Slonimsky, and John Kirkpatrick began to call attention to his music, and to support occasional performances through the 1930s and 40s.
And what of his music? Leonard Bernstein in a famous video with the Vienna Philharmonic called Ives an American “primitive,” which, of course, he was not. His education at Yale in the principles of sophisticated, mainstream art music was complete in every way. Think of the music of Johannes Brahms—Ives could compose music in that style and with that sophistication and complexity with ease. But soon after his graduation in 1898, he began radically to rethink ways of composing. Ways that ultimately established him, not only as the father of the American avant-garde, but in the fore of all those European composers that shocked the world in the early twentieth century. Name the advanced musical procedures of the last century that created the innovative and often dissonant sounds, complex rhythms, layered textures, complicated harmonies and melodic materials—Ives led the way. To name a few: tone clusters, polyrhythms, quartertones, polytonality, chance music, and more. To this impressive array of modernism must be added Ives’ penchant for extensive musical quotations. He infused his works with quotations from European masters and American popular and folk songs with equal alacrity.
Ives’ first symphony was written shortly after his graduation from Yale 1898, and does not display any of the fire-breathing innovations for which he became legendary. Rather, it, not unexpectedly, is somewhat conservative, and written in the style of mainstream European composers of the time—Dvořák and Tchaikovsky come to mind. But, the second symphony is a horse of a different color, altogether. Begun in 1897 and finished in 1902, it pointed most decidedly to the innovative, groundbreaking path ahead.
It has five movements, beginning with a slow one that serves rather like an introduction to the substantial allegro of the second movement. Into an impressive Brahmsian polyphonic texture Ives dishes out a liberal helping of main street American tunes. Anyone with Ives’ mastery of counterpoint and string texture in this movement could never be deemed a “primitive.” While somewhat derivative of some of his earlier compositions, his liberal quotation of the patriotic tune, “Columbia Gem of the Ocean,” and the fiddle tune, “Pig Town Fling,” is striking, indeed. To be sure, neither of these tunes are familiar to most Americans today, but they would have been well-known to American audiences around 1900—and a big surprise to them as well, occurring in the context of a “symphony.” While the admixture of “highbrow,” solemn contrapuntal writing and popular tunes may seem rather perverse, Ives brings it off beautifully, integrating them convincingly.
The charming allegro of the second movement is veritable celebration of nineteenth-century musical Americana. The tunes begin right off, and include an abolitionist work song, the familiar gospel hymn, “Bringing in the Sheaves,” and the more or less ridiculous college song, “Where, O Where Are the Pea-Green Freshmen?”
Ives’ approach is not simply to play the quotations straight through, but rather to spin them disjunctly, in a musical kaleidoscope of musical bits. The musical whole is much greater here than simply the sum of the bits of quotation. His skill as a thoroughly trained composer is evident throughout. In some ways, the source of the quoted material is almost irrelevant. If we had no knowledge of the tunes at all, it would make no difference in the coherence and integrity of the movement.
The third movement is exquisitely slow, beautifully orchestrated, and makes use of melodic materials from the gospel hymn, “Beulah Land,” and Samuel A. Ward’s “Materna,” the latter we all know as the melody of “America the Beautiful.” Ives, himself, characterized this movement as “à la Brahms,” but that is pellucidly clear to anyone familiar with the Viennese great. And, as with the preceding movement, the quotations are almost irrelevant, as every other element of musical composition in the work is exemplary of Ives’ mastery.
The Lento maestoso of the fourth movement Ives originally conceived as more or less an introduction to the last movement, for it is brief, and, indeed, functions as such, even after he chose to separate it as a stand-alone. Opening with a bold, almost ominous figure in the horns, it could easily be mistaken as part of the central European symphonic tradition of the mid-nineteenth century—think of Robert Schumann, perhaps. It too, is full of quotes of familiar American tunes, but he skillfully uses only the parts of them that lend themselves to the overall scheme of traditional symphonic manipulation and development. As it marches along darkly, the polyphonic texture gradually gains a sense of leading to a dénouement, and of course it soon does, in the following Allegro molto vivace.
The latter begins cheerfully with lots of references, but following Ives’ technique, only references, not full quotations. The list of tunes that constitute the whole is long. The attentive listener will hear bit of the following: Tchaikovsky’s Symphony #4,
“Camptown Races,” “Turkey in the Straw,” “Pigtown Fling,” “Old Black Joe,” Dvořák’s Symphony #9, “Pea-Green Freshmen,” “Long, Long Ago,” “Joy to the World,” Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier,” “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” “Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground,” and in the peroration, the bugle call, Reveille. It’s truly a musical farrago, but that somewhat misses the point. Rather, Ives has used the tunes as a melodic resource to create a musical work that, like all good drama, has a beginning, a middle, diversions, and a logical dénouement. He doesn’t just baldly quote them, but skillfully alters them to suit his ends, often combining in subtle ways than can easily escape notice. In other words, the work stands alone with musical integrity, even if no one noticed the purloined tunes. And finally, after an exciting drive to the conclusion, in the best traditions of symphonic music, there is the last chord. Whether performed short, as Ives wrote, or held momentarily, à la “Lenny” Bernstein, the “razzberry” of almost all the notes of the scale played simultaneously nails the shocking end. What does it mean? Only Ives knew for sure.
–Wm. E. Runyan
© 2025 William E. Runyan