Charles Ives was a composer before his time

In February 1951, Leonard Bernstein led the New York Philharmonic through the première of a symphony by an American composer unknown at Carnegie Hall. The composer in question was Charles Ives, by then too frail to attend in person. He listened from home when the concert was broadcast a few weeks later.

An experimenter by instinct, Ives’s work had already proved an inspiration to a younger generation of radical American composers including John Cage, Lou Harrison and Morton Feldman. But that Ives listened from afar to the première, at long last, of his Second Symphony – completed in 1902 – was symbolic of the distance he maintained from America’s classical mainstream.

The recording that Bernstein and the Philharmonic made of that symphony in 1958 is one of many standout moments in a recent 22 CD boxed set, The RCA and Columbia Album Anthology, belatedly released to celebrate the sesquicentennial of Ives’s birth in 1874. By the time Bernstein made his recording, Ives had been dead for four years, but the symphony still sounded like a fresh start for American symphonic music.

Symphonies tended to be as tightly argued and plotted as novels and, in the hands of Mozart, Beethoven and Mahler, had been considered the apex of compositional achievement – an ultimate expression of a composer’s individual mark. Ives upended this assumption. His symphony walked like a European late Romantic symphony, modeled vaguely on Dvorák’s New World and Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique symphonies. Yet it talked like American music.

Ives left his distinctive mark on the form, yet paradoxically barely any of the material in the symphony was his. The Second Symphony operated as a patchwork of allusions to evergreen Americana such as “Camptown Races,” “America The Beautiful” and “Turkey In The Straw,” all devoured as points of departure for melodic utterances that, rooted in familiar musical strains, could express themselves anew. Ives’s union between European and American culture was symbolized by the omnipresence of the four-note introductory motif to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, always hovering in the shadows, used as harmonic glue whenever Ives required it.

The young Charles would observe as his father encouraged multiple brass bands to play music at different tempi

Then Ives’s final chord descended abruptly, like a rude dissonant raspberry, as all the notes of the standard chromatic scale sounded in an instant.

Nobody else would have dared pull a stunt like that in 1902, but the capacity to hear other dimensions in music was embedded deep inside the Ives gene pool.

Music, for his father George, was akin to godliness. George’s lessons in the rudiments of music – in harmony, counterpoint, instrumentation – were rigorous and thorough, and Charles knew all there was to know about the technical nuts and bolts of music by his early teens. But George was also a visionary, with an unusually advanced understanding of sound. Bitonality and polytonality – exploiting the tensions between putting different keys together – are usually considered to be the domain of Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky. Microtonality – composers clawing open the conventional scale to explore the gaps between notes – is usually considered to be the concern of a generation of postwar composers centered around Stockhausen. Yet by the 1880s, Charles was being urged by his father to open his ears to all these sounds.

George had another auditory trick up his sleeve, too. The young Charles would observe as his father encouraged multiple brass bands to march simultaneously around their hometown of Danbury, Connecticut, each playing different music at different tempi, marches slamming into waltzes into marches.

He kept trace of the individual layers, but also perceived the overlaps as one fantastical, unpredictable soup of sound – and Ives’s sense of how music could unfold within concert halls began to follow a logic of its own.

The house in which Ives grew up is now a visitor attraction, although the building itself has been moved brick-by-brick twice to accommodate the shifting topography of the local riverbank. It feels like a metaphor for Ives’s music: always on the move through time and space.

After graduating from Yale, where he clashed with the traditionally minded composer Horatio Parker, Ives let his imagination run amok. His early orchestral compositions – The Unanswered Question, Central Park In the Dark, Three Places In New England – all written before 1914 – worked with groups of instruments dispersed around performance spaces, as though walking listeners’ ears through music rather than having them take in his pieces as an audience might watch a play.

Reissued recordings included in the box make clear how deeply Ives upset conventional wisdoms about how music ought to be recorded. The Unanswered Question for solo trumpet, a quartet of flutes and orchestral strings, appears twice, in versions considered classics: Bernstein’s with the New York Philharmonic again in 1964, and Morton Gould’s with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1966.

Ives framed the The Unanswered Question as a dialogue between what he termed “the eternal music of the spheres,” summoned up by the strings sustaining radiant, hymn-like tonal chords against another more disruptive force: niggling, atonal questions of existence presented by inquisitive trumpet motifs to which the flutes respond with increasingly melodically digressive answers.

A whole five years before Stravinsky unleashed his Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913 and Schoenberg composed his first 12-tone music, Ives was anticipating the crisis of music in the 20th century – that tension between the fundamental musical truth of tonality and the imperative to explore, to consolidate.

Bernstein and his engineers understood that each Ives score required a carefully cultivated sonic environment of its own. With the exception of a few early student works, his music could not be captured faithfully in the way of a conventional orchestral recording.

The Gould recording sounds as though each entity in Ives’s score – the solo trumpet, the flutes, the strings – was recorded separately then compressed into each other artificially. Bernstein’s recording, in notable contrast, conjures up a bespoke sound-picture which allows listeners to “see” the distance between the three groups of players.

Distinctions between music – allowing sound autonomy to move through space – were a major obsession of John Cage, whose 1952 composition 4’33” (too often mistakenly called his “silent piece”) was about allowing the sounds that already existed in a room permission to be heard, rather than inventing new ones.

If understanding – if not entirely “answering” – The Unanswered Question is the key to unlocking Ives’s intentions as a composer, his Concord sonata is usually the next port of call. Ives threw hymns, marches, ragtime, spirituals and waltzes into the salad mixer, and anticipated Cage by breaking the fourth wall. Cameo appearances for viola, in the first movement, then flute during the last movement, waft in from the outside, these apparently external sounds moving the sonata outside its own solo piano universe.

Ives’s music could not becaptured faithfully in the way of aconventional orchestral recording

The young Cage had taken inspiration from Ives’s responses to his letters about the nature of musical enquiry, and Ives would always show tremendous generosity of spirit toward younger composers. When Cage’s composer friend from Los Angeles, Lou Harrison, suffered a terrifying nervous breakdown – the hectic pace of New York City, manna from heaven to Cage, left Harrison feeling anxious and depressed – it was Ives who funded his long recovery in a psychiatric hospital.

Ives cast a fatherly eye over upcoming experimental composers. He knew that gaining acceptance was difficult, and he had one advantage they didn’t: knowing that making serious money from his music would be unlikely, Ives had set himself up in business and made his fortune from innovative insurance schemes. Most subsequent American composers – whether Bernstein, Cage, Elliott Carter, John Zorn, John Adams or Julia Wolfe – ended up dealing in their work with questions around musical structures in which different styles or ideas of music – popular, serious, sacred and profane – could coexist. Ives led the way.

When Bernstein presented Ives’s music to a Young Person’s Concert in 1967, he called him “our first great American composer” and declared his music a call to action: “If Ives could pioneer, so can we: it’s all in the spirit of adventure.”

Ives recordings by Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy and Morton Gould have since entered the canon as classics. But one of the joys of this collection is discovering lesser-known albums that emerged in their aftermath, especially Calcium Light Night – an anthology of miniatures assembled by the French horn player, composer and conductor Gunther Schuller.

The pieces that Schuller chose to revive such as Tone Roads No. 1 and Chromâtimelôdtune sound like musical visions of the future. Ives can be remembered as a time-traveler through American music, an all-seeing eye and pair of ears, whose presence changed everything.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s June 2025 World edition.