<<  -- 4 --  Jennifer Paull    IVES AND THE ESTABLISHMENT

Charles Ives liked to write letters to the president suggesting amendments to the constitution. There is no record of whether or not the president replied in kind with recommendations of amendments in Ives' music !

Mahler was interested in the 3rd Symphony, but regrettably, he died before being able to conduct it. Ives was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for this work, some 36 years after its composition, much to the modest composer's dismay.

Although he thus did live long enough to see his pieces rise from obscurity and disfavour to worldwide public acclaim, he gave away the prize money. 'Prizes are for boys' he said. 'I'm grown up !' One can only wonder at his pain hiding behind such a rejection of society, which itself had rejected him for so long.

There had not been one important performance of his music until he was 53 years old, but by 1976, he was the modern American composer most frequently heard in orchestral performances. By his death, Ives had received many performances and honours, and much of his music had been published. His reputation has continued to grow, and by his centenary in 1974, Ives was recognised worldwide as the first composer to create a distinctively American art music. The fourth symphony was not heard until eleven years after his death when Stokowski conducted it in 1965.

One of his uncompleted works was the Universe Symphony, meant to be performed outdoors, by several different orchestras on the tops of mountains, and huge choirs in the valleys. One can only surmise what he would have planned had he known of the possibility of world television coverage through satellite. Surely this would have been a fitting setting for Charles Ives' futuristic imagination ? The internet, for example, would enable such an idea not only to take place, but to come directly into the homes of Danbury present and Danbury future.

Ives suffered his final heart attack at the age of seventy nine.

To quote Upton Sinclair (1878-1963), the US novelist and contemporary of Ives :

'All truly great art is optimistic. The individual artist is happy in his creative work. The fact that practically all great art is tragic does not in any way change the above thesis.'

Charles Ives : Born Danbury, Connecticut 1874. Died New York City 1954