Charles Ives - Reception

Reception

Ives' music was largely ignored during his lifetime, particularly during the years in which he actively composed. Many of his published works went unperformed even many years after his death in 1954. But his reputation in more recent years has greatly increased. Juilliard commemorated the 50th anniversary of Ives' death by performing his music over six days in 2004. His musical experiments, including his increasing use of dissonance, were not well received by his contemporaries. Furthermore, the difficulties in performing the rhythmic complexities in his major orchestral works made them daunting challenges even decades after they were composed.

Early supporters of his music included Henry Cowell, Elliott Carter and Aaron Copland. Cowell's periodical New Music published a substantial number of Ives' scores (with the composer's approval), but for almost 40 years Ives had few performances that he did not arrange or back, generally with Nicolas Slonimsky as the conductor. After seeing a copy of Ives' self-published 114 Songs during the 1930s, Copland published a newspaper article praising the collection.

Ives began to acquire some public recognition during the 1930s, with performances of a chamber orchestra version of his Three Places in New England both in the U.S. and on tour in Europe by conductor Nicolas Slonimsky and the New York Town Hall premiere of his Concord Sonata by pianist John Kirkpatrick in 1939, which led to favorable commentary in the major New York newspapers. Later, around the time of the composer's death in 1954, Kirkpatrick teamed with soprano Helen Boatwright for the first extended recorded recital of Ives' songs for the obscure Overtone label (Overtone Records catalog number 7). Boatwright and Kirkpatrick recorded a new selection of songs for the Ives Centennial Collection that Columbia Records published in 1974.

His obscurity lifted a bit in the 1940s, when he met Lou Harrison, a fan of his music who began to edit and promote it. Most notably, Harrison conducted the premiere of the Symphony No. 3, The Camp Meeting (1904) in 1946. The next year, this piece won Ives the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Ives gave the prize money away (half of it to Harrison), saying "prizes are for boys, and I'm all grown up". Ives himself was a great financial supporter of twentieth century music, often supporting works that were written by other composers. This he did in secret, telling his beneficiaries it was really his wife who wanted him to do so. Nicolas Slonimsky said in 1971, "He financed my entire career."

At this time, Ives was also promoted by Bernard Herrmann, who worked as a conductor at CBS and in 1940 became principal conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra. While there, he championed Ives's music. When the two met, Hermann confessed that he had tried his hand at performing the Concord Sonata. Remarkably, Ives, who actually avoided the radio and the phonograph, agreed to make a series of piano recordings from 1933 to 1943 that were later issued by Columbia Records on a special LP set issued for Ives' centenary in 1974. New World Records issued 42 tracks of Ives' recordings on CD on April 1, 2006. One of the more unusual recordings, made in New York City in 1943, features Ives playing the piano and singing the words to his popular World War I song They Are There!, which he composed in 1917, then revised in 1942-43 for World War II.

Recognition of Ives's music steadily improved. He received praise from Arnold Schoenberg, who regarded him as a monument to artistic integrity, and from the New York School of William Schuman. Schoenberg's widow eventually found a note written by her husband shortly after his death (three years before Ives himself died). The note was originally written in 1944 when Schoenberg was living in Los Angeles and teaching at UCLA. It stated:

There is a great Man living in this Country – a composer. He has solved the problem how to preserve one's self-esteem and to learn . He responds to negligence by contempt. He is not forced to accept praise or blame. His name is Ives.

There is a report that Ives also won the admiration of Gustav Mahler, who said that Ives was a true musical revolutionary. Reportedly, Mahler talked of premiering Ives' Third Symphony with the New York Philharmonic, but the famous composer soon died (in 1911) thus preventing the premiere. However, the source of this story is Ives; since Mahler died, there was no way to verify whether Mahler had seen the score of the symphony or decided to perform it in 1911-12 season of the New York Philharmonic. However, what is true is that Ives regularly attended New York Philharmonic concerts and probably saw Mahler conduct the Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall.

In 1951, Leonard Bernstein conducted the world premiere of Ives' Second Symphony in a broadcast concert by the New York Philharmonic. The Iveses heard the performance on their cook's radio and were amazed at the audience's warm reception to the music. Bernstein continued to conduct Ives' music and made a number of recordings with the Philharmonic for Columbia Records. He even honored Ives on one of his televised youth concerts and in a special disc included with the reissue of the 1960 recording of the second symphony and the Fourth of July movement from Ives' Holiday Symphony.

Another pioneering Ives recording, undertaken during the 1950s, was the first complete set of the four violin sonatas, performed by Cleveland Orchestra concertmaster Rafael Druian and John Simms. Leopold Stokowski took on Symphony No. 4 in 1965, regarding the work as "the heart of the Ives problem". The Carnegie Hall world premiere by the American Symphony Orchestra led to the first recording of the music. Another promoter of Ives was choral conductor Gregg Smith, who made a series of recordings of the composer's shorter works during the 1960s, including first stereo recordings of the psalm settings and arrangements of many short pieces for theater orchestra. The Juilliard String Quartet recorded the two string quartets during the 1960s.

Today, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas is an enthusiastic exponent of Ives' symphonies as is composer and biographer Jan Swafford. Ives' work is regularly programmed in Europe. Ives has also inspired pictorial artists, most notably Eduardo Paolozzi, who entitled one of his 1970s sets of prints Calcium Light Night, each print being named for an Ives' piece (including Central Park in the Dark). In 1991, Connecticut's legislature designated Ives as that state's official composer.

The Scottish baritone Henry Herford began a survey of Ives' songs in 1990, but this remains incomplete because the record company involved (Unicorn-Kanchana) collapsed. Pianist-composer and Wesleyan University professor Neely Bruce has made a life's study of Ives. To date, he has staged seven parts of a concert series devoted to the complete songs of Ives. Musicologist David Gray Porter reconstructed a piano concerto, the "Emerson" Concerto, from Ives' sketches. A recording of the work was released by Naxos Records.