196 PART 2 | FROM THE CIVIL WAR THROUGH WORLD WAR I
deference to European thought and prejudice has imposed upon us. Masquer-
ading in the so-called nationalism of Negro clothes cut in Bohemia will not help
us. What we must arrive at is the youthful optimistic vitality and the undaunted
tenacity of spirit that characterizes the American man. This is what I hope to see
echoed in American music.”
Had he lived to see it, MacDowell might have been surprised to learn that the
task of creating a national music from “negro melodies” would eventually fall to
African American musicians—perhaps the central story of American music in
the twentieth centur y. But it probably would have come as no surprise to Dvorˇák,
who enjoyed a lively exchange of musical ideas with his African American stu-
dents at the National Conservatory. In the meantime, a younger composer work-
ing in isolation was developing a much different approach to the challenge of
writing American music.CHARLES IVES
Charles Edward Ives was born in 1874 in Danbury, Connecticut. George Ives,
Charles’s father, had studied music in New York City, led a military band from
Danbury during the Civil War, then returned to his hometown to work as a
bandmaster, performer, and teacher of music. Charlie, as family members knew
him, showed uncommon talent on the keyboard, began composing at eleven,
played snare drum in his father’s band, and took his fi rst post as a paid church
organist at fourteen. In 1894, the year Charlie enrolled at Yale College, his father
died, a loss he mourned for the rest of his life. After an academically undistin-
guished career at Yale, which included composition study with Horatio Parker,
Ives graduated in 1898, moved to New York City, and began a career in busi-
ness that led him into life insurance and estate planning.
Unconnected with New York’s public musical life after 1902, when he gave
up his last job as a church organist, Ives composed prolifi cally in private, at least
until 1917, when an illness brought both his business and his composing to a
temporary halt. Three years later, he printed, at his own expense, the large-
scale Piano Sonata no. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840–1860, and a prose companion piece,
Essays before a Sonata. In 1922 his self-published 114 Songs appeared in print. Nei-
ther of these works drew much notice from critics, performers, or the public.
Yet they were part of a large body of music unlike that of any other composer,
living or dead, much of it radically forward-looking in style yet rooted in Ameri-
can musical traditions and history. In the 1930s younger American composers
began to discover Ives, delighted to fi nd an older fi gure whose music spoke with
so distinctive a voice. As musicians gradually woke up to Ives’s music—the Con-
cord Sonata was not premiered until 1939, and in 1947 he won a Pulitzer Prize
for his Symphony no. 3, composed some forty years earlier—they encountered a
fi gure whose background was as unusual as his musical approach.
Ives credited his father with shaping his musical outlook. By Charles’s
testimony, George Ives had considered music a spiritually precious thing
and conveyed his love for it to his son. And he was something of a visionary
when it came to acoustics. Charles remembered an experiment of George’s
in which violin strings were “stretched over a clothes press and let down with
weights,” intended to produce quarter-tone subdivisions of the scale. George’sK Charles Ives (1874–1954)
attended the Hopkins Grammar
School in New Haven,
Connecticut, where he pitched
for the school baseball team,
a year before entering Yale.
He is pictured here at left with
Hopkins teammate Franklin Miles
(18 9 4).172028_08_183-204_r3_ko.indd 196 23/01/13 10:24 AM