Ives, Charles

4. Innovation and synthesis, 1902–8.

Leaving his church position freed evenings and weekends for composition, and forgoing regular performance allowed Ives freedom to explore without having to please anyone but himself. No longer a Parker apprentice, nor a composer of popular or sacred music, Ives entered a period of innovation and synthesis.

He continued experimenting, especially now in chamber music, whose greater range of sonorities allowed him to extend traditional counterpoint and increase the independence between the parts to create an effect of separate layers. Works such as the Fugue in Four Keys on ‘The Shining Shore’, From the Steeples and the Mountains, Largo risoluto nos.1 and 2, and The Unanswered Question display polytonal and atonal canons, multiple layers distinguished by rhythm, pitch content and sonority, and the combination of atonal and tonal planes, often with a programme to explain the unusual musical procedures. For example, Scherzo: All the Way Around and Back gradually builds up six distinct layers, subdividing each bar into 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11 equal divisions respectively, over which a bugle plays fanfares in common time (ex.2); the piece is palindromic, swelling to a climax and returning in an exact retrograde, a musical analogue to ‘a foul ball [in baseball] – and the base runner on 3rd has to go all the way back to 1st’.

Ives now sought increasingly to integrate vernacular and church style into his concert music. In his Second Symphony, the major work of this period, he introduced for the first time both hymn tunes and American popular songs into a piece in the classical tradition. The framework is still European, a cyclic five-movement symphony in late Romantic style with direct borrowings from Bach, Brahms, Wagner, Dvořák and Tchaikovsky; the final two movements are modelled on the finale of Brahms’s First Symphony. But the themes are all paraphrased from American melodies, including hymns, fiddle tunes and Stephen Foster songs, reshaped to suit sonata and ternary forms. Like many symphonies which employ national material, the work celebrates the nation’s music while conforming to an international style. In other pieces, such as the improvisations and sketches that became the Ragtime Dances, Ives began to evolve a more modern and individual idiom that drew on American melodic and rhythmic characteristics, including ragtime, the currently popular style. The many guises the Ragtime Dances would eventually assume – from a set of dances for theatre orchestra to movements in his Piano Sonata no.1, Set for Theatre Orchestra and Orchestral Set no.2, and passages in his second Quarter-Tone Piece for two pianos – illustrate again his penchant for reworking his own music into new forms.

Having abandoned music as a career, Ives cast his lot with insurance. However, in 1905 the New York state legislature launched an investigation of scandals in the insurance business, with Mutual and the Raymond agency as particular targets. Although Ives was not implicated, higher executives were, and the agency was ultimately dissolved. The investigation coincided with two bouts of illness or exhaustion for Ives, in the summer of 1905 and late 1906, possibly the first signs of the diabetes that would later afflict him. While recuperating over Christmas 1906 at Old Point Comfort, Virginia, he finalized plans with Myrick to launch an agency affiliated with Washington Life, which had begun as a Mutual subsidiary; it appears that Mutual’s management helped with the arrangements. The ideals Ives stated and pursued as a businessman were, ironically, those articulated at the hearings by the president of Mutual: that life insurance was not a scheme for profit, but a way for each policyholder to provide for his family while ‘participating in a great movement for the benefit of humanity at large’ through mutual assistance. Ives & Co. opened on 1 January 1907, with Myrick as Ives’s assistant.

The year 1905 also began changes in Ives’s personal life, as he renewed his acquaintance with Harmony Twichell, now a registered nurse. Their courtship was slow, hindered by long absences, infrequent times together, and Ives’s shyness. She wrote poems, some of which he set to music in a tonal, Romantic style meant to please her and her family, and they planned an opera that never materialized. Their friendship grew in intensity until they professed their love for each other on 22 October 1907. They were married on 9 June 1908 by Harmony’s father, the Rev. Joseph Twichell, at his Congregational church in Hartford, and settled in New York.