Ives was born on October 20, 1874 in Danbury, Connecticut. Ives' early musical experiences came from his father, George, a former Civil war bandmaster and a music teacher in Danbury. George gave his son a quite unconventional musical upbringing, encouraging Charles to experiment with and push the boundaries of music. An example is George playing "Swanee River" in the key of C while Charles sang it in E flat. Charles did learn the conventional rules of music theory, which his father insisted he learn before he went about breaking them. Charles is quoted as saying that his father put him through such exercises to "stretch his ears" and make him "less dependent on customs and habits."
Ives did study at Yale with Horatio Parker, but his decision to not solely be a composer was deliberate. Instead, he set up a very successful insurance business and composed on the side. Ives believed that his success in business helped him as a composer and kept his music clean and honest. His idea was that if he had to make a living writing music, he would be doing it for all the wrong reasons.
Ives is unique in the fact that he wrote almost all his music before 1918. He suffered a heart attack in that year, and this event signaled the end of his work as a composer. He was a very secretive man, and as a result, his music went unheard for many years. Also, the music he wrote was very innovative and extremely difficult to perform. His score notation was almost impossible to read, and he seemed to deliberately write unplayable parts (a la Beethoven).
Ives's music was so far ahead of its time that it had to be 'rediscovered' in the 1940s to be truly appreciated. By that time, many innovations had been introduced into music, but Ives had been using most of them long before they became popular. In the book 'The Lives of the Great Composers,' Igor Stravinsky is quoted as saying, 'But Ives had already transgressed the "limits of tonality" more than a decade before Schoenberg, had written music exploiting polytonality almost two decades before "Petrushka," and had experimented with polyorchestral groups a half century before Stockhausen.'
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