Music: Ives the Innovator

There is a great Man living in this Country—a composer. He has solved the problem of how to preserve one's self and to learn. He responds to negligence by contempt. He is not forced to accept praise or blame. His name is Ives.

—Arnold Schoenberg, in a note found after his death in 1951

For most of his life, Charles Edward Ives (1874-1954) was known to friends and business associates as a successful insurance executive who also dabbled in composing odd and seemingly unplayable music. He was past 50 in fact before anyone important performed his works. He finished his Symphony No. 3, for example, in 1904; it was not performed until 1946, and a year later earned Ives a Pulitzer Prize. He finished his Symphony No. 4 in 1916; it was not played in its entirety until 1965.

Today, more than half a century after he completed the bulk of his work, Ives is generally acknowledged as the greatest, certainly the most original of America's composers. A fierce, patriotic innovator, he combined the best instincts of Edison and Whitman; he was the first important American to pioneer a musical path outside the European tradition. He was once thought of, erroneously, as a kind of Grandma Moses of music, an untutored primitive breaking all the rules without realizing it. Ives broke the rules all right, but only after having mastered them as a Yale music student. "I found I could not go on using the familiar chords only," he once said. "I heard something else." In his plural textures and unconventional progressions, he was creative kin to Pound. In his bald and unashamed quoting of pop tunes, he can be said to have prophesied pop art. In the incredible tensions he built up by playing one key or rhythm against another, or in the way he could move dreamily from tender simplicity to the densest of instrumental textures, he was a forward-looking denizen of the age of anxiety. He was in short an original.

To mark the 100th anniversary of his birth in Danbury, Conn., the nation's musical forces are giving Ives' music the kind of extensive exposure it never had during his lifetime. In Florida, the University of Miami is sponsoring a seven-month celebration, during which 35 musical organizations intend to perform all of Ives' published works. Conductor Pierre Boulez and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center have devoted a week to an Ives festival. Yale University and Brooklyn College concluded a joint Charles Ives Centennial Festival-Conference last week.

There is a handsome new five-LP album, Charles Ives, the 100th Anniversary (Columbia; $27.98), which includes some of Ives' own piano performances and has already worked its way onto the classical bestseller lists. Best of several new books is Vivian Perlis' Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History (Yale University Press; $12.50), a compilation of interviews with 57 school chums, business associates, relatives and musicians who knew him as well as anyone could know a reticent and often crusty New Englander.