Ives, Charles

2. Youth, 1874–94.

The Iveses were one of Danbury’s leading families, prominent in business and civic improvement and active in social causes, such as the abolition of slavery. Ives’s father George E. Ives (1845–94) was exceptional in making music a career. He took lessons in the flute, violin, piano and cornet, following which, during 1860–62, he studied harmony, counterpoint and orchestration with the German-born musician Carl Foeppl in New York. After Civil War service as the youngest bandmaster in the Union Army and two more years in New York, he returned to Danbury and pursued a variety of musical activities, performing, teaching and leading bands, orchestras and choirs in and near Danbury, and sometimes touring with travelling shows. He also worked in businesses connected to the Ives family. He married Mary (‘Mollie’) Elizabeth Parmalee (1849–1929) on 1 January 1874, and Charles was born late the same year, followed by J. Moss (1876–1939), who became a lawyer and judge in Danbury.

Through his father, Ives was exposed to the entire range of music-making in Danbury. He studied the piano and organ from a young age with a series of teachers and was playing in recitals by his early teens. He became an accomplished performer and composer in two musical traditions, American vernacular music and Protestant church music, and gained his first exposure to a third, European classical music. Additionally, he was an avid athlete and was captain of several baseball and football teams. Ives played the drums with his father’s band, and the spirit of band performance echoes in many works of his maturity. He wrote marches for piano, band and theatre orchestra, several of which adopt the then common practice of setting a popular song in one section of the march. His first publicly performed piece may have been the march Holiday Quickstep, written when he was 13; the review in the Danbury Evening News of the January 1888 première called him ‘certainly a musical genius’ and declared ‘we shall expect more from this talented youngster in the future’.

At the age of 14 he became the youngest salaried church organist in the state, and he worked regularly as one until 1902. He wrote anthems and sacred songs for church services, at first using hymn texts and a hymn-like style (as in Psalm 42), and then from about 1893 (in works such as Crossing the Bar) adopting the more elaborate and chromatic style of Dudley Buck, with whom he briefly studied the organ around 1895. The hymns he knew from church and from camp-meeting revivals, where his father sometimes led the singing with his cornet, he later regularly borrowed or reworked as themes in sonatas, quartets and symphonies. He heard some classical music in concert performances in both Danbury and New York and learnt rather more through his own study and performance of works by Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Rossini, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Wagner, John Knowles Paine and others on the piano or organ, including many transcriptions. His virtuoso Variations on ‘America’ (1891–2) shows just how skilled an organist Ives was while still in his late teens.

Although he had many teachers for performance, his father taught him harmony and counterpoint and guided his first compositions. Several of these take existing works as models, following the traditional practice of learning through imitation, such as the Polonaise for two cornets and piano (c1887–9), modelled on the sextet from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. At the same time, Ives’s father had an open mind about musical theory and practice and encouraged his son’s experimentation. Bitonal harmonizations of London Bridge, polytonal canons and fugues, and experiments with whole-tone pieces, triads in parallel motion and chromatic lines moving in contrary motion to create expanding or contracting wedges, all dating from the early 1890s, show Ives’s interest in testing the rules of traditional music by trying out alternative systems. At the time, however, Ives apparently conceived of this merely as playing with music theory, a private activity shared primarily with his father, rather than regarding these new systems as a serious basis for composing concert music. On still another musical plane, it was his father whom he credited with teaching him the songs of Stephen Foster, whose tunes he would later borrow and whose simple diatonic lyricism informs many of Ives’s own melodies.

Ives moved to New Haven in early 1893 to attend Hopkins Grammar School and prepare for entrance examinations at Yale (fig.1). He was the organist at St Thomas’s Episcopal Church for a year, and then moved to Center Church on the Green in September 1894, the same month he matriculated at Yale. Just six weeks later, on 4 November, his father died suddenly of a stroke. Leaving home, starting university, and especially the death of his principal teacher and supporter marked a sharp break from the past and the end of his youth.