At 150, Charles Ives Still Reflects the Darkness and Hope of America

Sunday is the 150th anniversary of the composer Charles Ives’s birth, and the most fitting way to celebrate would be to bang your fists on the table and rail against the damned closed-mindedness of classical music, with its lazy dependence on a predictable canon. But honestly, that’s old news; a lot of the classical community is already doing that. Would Ives be satisfied by the current state of things? Hard to say. Improvements have been made but not, I suspect, enough.

Ives, a Connecticut Yankee, straddled tumultuous and defining eras of American life; he was born in the shadow of the Civil War and lived almost a decade after World War II. He had no shortage of grand visions, whether for music or for his quite successful insurance business. He conceived influential strategies of estate planning and formulas for coverage. He dreamed that music would evolve into “a language, so transcendent, that its heights and depths will be common to all mankind.” (This didn’t pan out, unless you count Taylor Swift.) And, in the first two decades of the 20th century, he dreamed up a radically original American musical voice — an enviable triumph that came bundled with failure. It was a voice many people didn’t want to hear, and still don’t.

It is easy to understand the doubts of audiences, befuddled by under-rehearsed and under-enthused orchestral performances of Ives’s work. It is harder to forgive this neglect in professional musicians. Not long ago, I was in a car with a distinguished British cellist who admitted he knew just one Ives piece: the cheeky satire “Variations on America.” When I mentioned the anniversary, he said that Ives was “cute,” but that was it. This condescending opinion, offered in near-perfect ignorance, made me want to dump every last ounce of British tea into the nearest harbor.

Concert presenters don’t seem super keen this anniversary, either. Thankfully, the writer Joseph Horowitz took initiative and obtained grants for events at Indiana University, Carnegie Hall and elsewhere. Pam Tanowitz cleverly curated and directed a program at the Juilliard School that traces Ives to other experimental artists. But that seems to be the extent of Juilliard’s commitment.

The BBC Proms in Britain were more festive than most. (Cancel that tea party!) As a pianist, I’m trying to do my bit by performing the “Concord” Sonata, including at the 92nd Street Y New York in December, and releasing a recording of the violin sonatas with Stefan Jackiw on Nonesuch. But there doesn’t seem to be a groundswell of demand. It’s more like a bunch of passionate Ives nuts are standing at a street corner, begging the world to care.

Some of this is Ives’s fault. If he wasn’t antagonizing people, he would have felt he was on the wrong path, not bold enough in challenging listeners’ tastes and minds. But the Ives problem is also tied to his origin story as an inventor of distinctively American music; his work is hard to separate from the complications of nationalism.

Parts of Ives’s nationalism have enduring appeal: the desire to create anew, to break the rules and tell the habits of composition to go to hell, to declare that music’s greatness doesn’t belong to the educated or trained, least of all the stuffy professor. All this feels like a happy package of Yankee pride and self-reliance that I was sold as a child in school, without dwelling on the dark sides.

Ives’s writings, full of bitterness and spleen, reveal plenty of that darkness. It is sad to read some of this, though much of the most problematic writing comes after his health had deteriorated around 1920. He bashes Europe with glee. He hurls sexist and homophobic epithets. Chopin, for example: “one just naturally thinks of him with a skirt on, but one he made himself.” A string quartet concert: “a whole evening of mellifluous sounds, perfect cadences, perfect ladies, perfect programs, and not a dissonant cuss word to stop the anemia and beauty.” Most of all, he denounces the lamestream musical media through the invention of a recurring nemesis called Rollo. Nicknames, misogyny, attacking the media — an awfully familiar cocktail of behavior.

Let’s concede that Ives is not the easiest man or composer to love. At his worst, he shows us some of the poison in the American psyche. But the essential argument for Ives is that his music also offers us the antidote. Its animating idea is generous: a restless search to find more in America than we thought, or even hoped, to find.

An important ingredient of the Ivesian antidote is laughter — his wild, often childlike sense of humor, his willingness to fail. Many of his works begin by trying to begin, limping through a series of false starts, like Christopher Lloyd’s character in “Back to the Future,” or some similar mad inventor, trying to get an engine to go. At the beginning of the ragtime of the Third Violin Sonata, for instance, the piano plunks down bass notes while the right hand tries out ideas.

These riffs slide around, splutter out and seem to lose heart, until, at last, the momentum of inspiration takes over.

This feels less like a composition than a composition being written. Ives worked on these passages, you sense, not to achieve perfection, but glorious imperfection. Not music as a refined object, to be placed on the shelf, but as a process, something being made in front of us.

Once the ragtime finally gets going, its energy is unstoppable.

This fiendish array of syncopations, samples and rhythmic loops is typical of Ives’s vision of America: never a single stream, but always a regenerating, reinventing mix. After pages of madness, the ragtime returns innocently to its opening riffs.

This ending always charms audiences. Absurd complexity suddenly resolves into disarming simplicity. One of Ives’s signatures is the way simple and complex are not segregated. Neither are so-called high and low categories of musical art. He is constantly shuffling them together, forcing them in contact, even, or especially, if it feels uncomfortable.

It is interesting to compare this one-of-a-kind piece with contemporaneous European ragtime tributes. Hindemith’s “Ragtime,” from 1922, purges all the lightness and elegance of rag to offer a heavy motoric assault. Stravinsky caricatures differently in his “Piano-Rag-Music” (1919), turning syncopation inside out with an urbane smile.

Both feel like ragtime in quotation marks. You can almost hear those Europeans (like a certain cellist) calling ragtime “cute.” Ives understood that ragtime was not primarily a genre but an act. He approaches it with more respect — even awe — for the power and joy of syncopation unleashed against the square, white tunes of traditional Americana, a musical force that remains one of the most powerful on the planet.

Part of Ives’s antidote to nationalism, too, is his willingness to slay sacred cows, to undermine the high and mighty. The last movement of the First Violin Sonata (one of a thousand examples) takes on the march — a handy emblem of national pride and swagger. Ives gives us barely enough of the rhythm to tell us we are marching, then disrupts it with offbeats and voice-leading collisions, creating a march at war with the idea of a march, an anti-swagger, disintegrating into dark silence.

Is this a joke? Or is it disturbing? This passage allows for an unusual range of interpretive possibilities: not differences of degree, but absolute opposition.

If I had to choose one piece to represent Ives’s most important achievements, it is the slow movement of the First Violin Sonata, a reflection on the Civil War. We begin by musing over a cliché tune of American nostalgia, “The Old Oaken Bucket,” filtered through Ives’s imagination into a ravishing idyll.

But soon a march begins in the piano, drowning out the violin, which is left in the past, quietly remembering while the boys go off to war.

A terrifying disconnect, with one violent, overabundant (and somewhat Wagnerian) voice making another impossible to hear. Is there a more powerful image for our current debates about free speech?

Ives loves to rove through time, and to sample an array of voices, so we fast-forward to hear nostalgic veterans, boasting of former military glories.

But this devolves into a long argument, with piano and violin talking past each other in unyielding bubbles. (Sound familiar?)

In the final pages, you hear flashes of the tender beginning.

These fleeting visions of unity are so beautiful, but unsettling to play today.

It is instructive to compare this portrait of America, so profound yet so unloved, with the far more identifiably American voice of Aaron Copland. Who doesn’t love “Appalachian Spring” or “Rodeo”? Certainly, advertisers do. His music has been used for the Beef Industry Council (so authentically western) and Oldsmobiles (’tis a gift to be simple!). One of the beef ad makers has said, of Copland: “People may not be able to place it, but they know there is something familiar about it.” In other words, savvy marketers want the benefits of something known, without the actual work of knowing it.

You do not see advertisers beating at the door of the Ives estate to use his music in commercials. His music is not ready to package or post on Instagram. But there is knowledge in it. Copland’s music has a cleanness, a belief that all the parts must function. It implies an optimism that America might solve its issues with a lyrical barn-raising or spiritual-singing or cattle-rustling.

Ives is optimistic, too, but always messy. His music suggests America will just have to muddle through, and wrestle with its own failure. Maybe that makes him hard to take. But at this moment, Ives seems to be more right than ever, more essential, more alive. His best advice — advice we could all use — is to open your ears.