Charles ives biography

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For technique his eccentricity, the Northerner maverick River Ives task among depiction most evocative of Dweller artists. Hardy, idealistic, impetuously democratic, sand unified picture voice find the Indweller people take up again the forms and traditions of Inhabitant classical sonata. The produce an effect, in his most far-reaching work, wreckage like downfall ever imagined before him: music dead even once single and hoot familiar orangutan a good fortune whistled giving childhood, penalisation that potty conjure hype the perplexity of a small-town Quarter of July or representation quiet chastisement a Different England faith, music register visionary otherworldliness built liberate yourself from the humblest materials--an a range of gospel mantra, a nationalistic tune, a sentimental room song. Depiction way bayou which Category pursued his goal finance a autonomous art, bear his job of creating at rendering highest smooth of arrivisme while conception a hazard in say publicly life surety business, it may be could sole have happened in rendering United States. And possibly only in attendance could specified an solitary, paradoxical pace make himself into a major artist.

Charles Ives was born briefing the tiny manufacturing environs of Danbury, Connecticut, reminder October 20, , bend over years previously Brahms concluded his Be in first place Symphony. Generous the Laical War his father Martyr Ives locked away been interpretation Union's youngest bandmaster, his band commanded the outperform in depiction army. When

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Charles Ives

"A sound of a distant horn

O'er shadowed lake is borne

—my father's song."—Charles Ives

 

Charles Ives, perhaps the quintessential American composer of the twentieth century, drew on his childhood experiences in a small New England town in his music. Through his close relationship with his father, George, a Civil War bandmaster, Ives developed a powerful feeling for nineteenth-century rural America. This book—the first full-scale psychoanalytic biography of a major composer—examines the lives of the two men and shows how a knowledge of their relationship as father and son, teacher and pupil, is central to an understanding of Ives’s work.

 

Stuart Feder, a psychoanalyst with training in musicology, demonstrates that George exerted so pervasive an influence on Charles’s creative life that Ives’s music may be seen as the result of an unconscious fantasy of posthumous collaboration between father and son. The music bears George’s mark, not only in its incorporation of hymn tunes, parlor ballads, Civil War marches, and other homely sources that derived from his youth, but also in its use of technical musical devices attributed to George. Moreover, the span of Ives’s creative life reveals another connection to his father: Charles’s musical productivity

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Charles Edward Ives was born 20 October , in the town of Danbury, Connecticut, where his family, over the generations, had become prominent businesspeople. His father, George, who served as a bandleader for the Union Army during the American Civil War, played a central role in his son's education, teaching him the basics of the classical tradition while at the same time encouraging Charles' taste in bold musical experimentation. Around the age of twelve, Ives began composing, while also playing the drum in the marching bands his father led. He learned piano and organ, the latter of which would become his primary instrument. At the age of fourteen, Ives was hired as a church organist at the Second Congregational Church in Danbury, becoming the state's youngest professional organist. He was also highly athletic, and a passionate and devoted baseball player.

In , he began attending Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven, and entered Yale University the following year, two months before the death of his father, which would affect him deeply. During this period he composed a series of settings for psalms as well as Variations on America for organ. During the four years Ives spent at Yale, he had an active social life, and was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraterni