Charles Ives

Charles Ives's career was a curious one: by the date of his death in New York in 1954, he had not written any music for almost a quarter of a century, having devoted much of the rest of his life to building up his insurance business, from which he retired, for reasons of ill health, in 1930. Regarded by many of his colleagues and contemporaries as an amateur, Ives nonetheless occupies an important place in the musical avant-garde: from the end of the 19th century, he was already experimenting with a number of the techniques that were not to be taken up by European composers until many years later and that include atonality, quarter tones, collage and open forms. Completely ignored, he made no attempt to publish his many works – works that range from hymns, ballads, and popular songs to piano sonatas, chamber and organ music, and numerous large-scale orchestral pieces. It was only during the 1930s that his works began to be performed and he found himself the object of wholly unwanted attention. He was as indifferent to his election to the National Institute of Arts and Lettres in 1946 as he was to the Pulitzer Prize that he received in 1947 for his Third Symphony – a work, it should be noted, that he had written in 1904.