Charles Ives was situated in as conducive a social and historical context for producing an eccentric composer as one could ask for. New England had long been a cradle for independent business as much as for independent philosophy. Raw experience, both of ordinary living and quiet reflection were very much at hand. The European philosophers were far away, a distant memory to flavor American thought. Popular ballads, ragtime and Gospel hymns were all around Danbury, Connecticut while the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms were occasional imports from across the ocean. Add to that a father who has is own individualistic approach to music, and you end up with the music of his son, Charles.

Unlike most other composers, Ives wanted his music to be guided by the impressions of his experience. It was not for musical structure to shape his experience. His teacher, Horatio Parker, wanted him to end his first symphony in the key it started in. Ives was loathe to do that if experience did not bring him to the place where he started. Common events provided much of his inspiration: the fireworks on the Fourth of July, the joy of striking out a batter in baseball, Congregational Church worship with its heartfelt out-of-tune singing, and meditations while walking along the Housatonic River. These experiences tended to blur into one another. During a quiet walk in New York's Central Park, a ragtime band could be heard playing in a café. Two marching bands might rehearse different marches at the same time. Ives was inclined to let the mix of these experiences guide his music and see what happened.

Actually, it was not unusual for a composer to portray the polysemous dimensions of reality through putting two or three themes together. Where Ives differed from his predecessors was in his tendency to put the themes in different keys and let them wander in their own rhythmic patterns with little reference to the other tunes sharing the same musical space. Interestingly enough, in following his raw experience, Ives' music tends to settle into a typical three-movement progression: a short impressionistic movement, a rollicking scherzo, and a more or less mystical finale, designed to bring the listener's consciousness up to a higher level.

I can't think of any composer who was as consistently programmatic at Charles Ives, at least in his instrumental music. It wasn't just a case of writing in an ascending glissando for the whole orchestra to sound like a boy's firecracker. The patriotic song "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean," had to enter into it as well. Although composers had used folk tunes and, occasionally, even current popular tunes as themes, almost all of Ives' thematic material consists of tunes that were common currency of ordinary New Englanders. The extra-musical associations, then, are very heavy. Labels "secular" and "sacred" are pasted on the music so that one knows which is which and when the two are being conflated in some way. The common associations of these tunes lead to conceptual clarity that should be easily explained. Interestingly enough, Ives uses this very clarity to show up the inadequacies of language and the clear conceptions it offers.

Let us begin with a look at Ives' Piano Trio. This work captures something of the flavor of the composer's days at Yale. The first movement sounds pretty shapeless musically, but actually is based on a formalistic trick. First the cello plays a meandering, tuneless melody over irrelevant chords in the right hand of the piano. Then the violin plays its own meandering figures with the left hand of the piano. Then the two parts are played together. It all sounds like a dry-as-dust lecture in the class room. The earnest words of his professors are of little, or no, value. There is hardly any experience to experience. The element of school life that, theoretically, is the most important is rendered the least significant. The second movement, about twice as long as the first, is a rambunctious scherzo depicting recreational fun at the college. Several popular tunes jostle each other in and out of the music. The climax features "My own Kentucky Home"with all the gusto and uncertainty of pitch typical of a dozen drunken students. This carousing is not, however, conducive to the use of language as fragments of ragged tunes interrupt each other as quickly as people interrupt each other at these parties. If the comparative length of the movements means anything, playing around is twice as important as study. The third movement, though, conveying worship in the school chapel is, again, roughly twice as long as the second. A much more vigorous version of what could be called the "proclamation" theme from the first movement makes its return and several Gospel hymns, especially "Rock of Ages," receive rhapsodic treatment that break them apart, thus opening them to new dimensions of reality only hinted at in their original forms. Worship has space for the words of the preacher and the words of the hymns, but both of these evaporate in a deeper silence before the mystery of God.

The Second String Quartet uses the ensemble most suited for musical dialogue to explore the place of language further. The first movement, "Discussions" gives the effect of four people (well, four men in Ives' world) having a mostly quiet discussion about "things." Only when the tune "Dixie" enters in does the conversation heat up a bit. On the whole, the music is remarkable for not doing much musically, much like the opening movement of the trio. The second movement, "Arguments" is energetic but also fails to appeal to any human sentiment other than the funny bone. The poor second violin represents the caricature "Rollo," who wants music to sound sweet and nice while the others prefer something much more rugged and manly. (Ives seems to have needed to exert his masculinity in emphatic ways.) In the final movement, the four interlocutors shut up and walk to the mountain. A numinous sense overcomes the music. Whereas dissonance had indicated human discord, in the finale, the dissonance dissolves the tensions into a broader unity before which one must be silent.

The "Concord" Sonata is inseparable from the words of its subjects" Emerson, Hawthorn, Alcott, and Thoreau. Emerson, the most verbose of the four, gets the first movement. Unlike the other examples of the Ivesian three-movement progression, this first movement is the longest and most-developed one, and is not as dry of emotional content. The emotional structure is, however, quite choppy. Emerson was notorious for changing his mind in mid-thought and he was just as prone to changing his mood without warning. For somewhere between a quarter hour and twenty minutes, the listener takes a tour of these vacillating moods portrayed by musical ideas that constantly interrupt each other. Unlike the professors at Yale and the interlocutors of the Second String Quartet, Emerson's use of language, for all its limitations, does accomplish something. The jumble of thoughts tumbling over each other add up to some powerful statements that end up with more coherence than one might expect, just as the musical ideas of the movement keep recurring through various transformations to hold the movement together. Hawthorne draws the scherzo movement. This designation is a bit startling because much of Hawthorne's fiction is heavy and somber. Ives, however, needed a scherzo, and he picked up on the element of fantasy in Hawthorne and also, the story "The Celestial Railway" which was to inspire this movement and the scherzo of the Fourth Symphony. (This story tells of a few pilgrims who take the long trek through life on the way to salvation while most people take a train to heaven, only to find that the track breaks off just before the pearly gates.) As usual with Ives' scherzos, the Hawthorne movement negates language by canceling out each utterance as soon as it is made. The "Allcotts" movement is a domestic interlude preceding the mystical finale. Ives seems to both celebrate and mock the quiet, domestic, conventional life of America, just as his use of sentimental popular tunes throughout his work shows both affection and mockery. The "Thoreau" movement defies description. Basically, it affords the sense of Thoreau's quest to merge into the nature that surrounded him at Walden Pond. It is unmetered, that is, there are no bar lines, thus allowing for a free flow of the music. Thoreau is, perhaps, no more coherent than Emerson, but he sounds as if he is. Where the themes interrupted each other before, now they merge into each other until they sound like one thread of music. The Fourth Symphony is the culmination of Ives's musical vision. This time, the first movement includes words sung by the chorus, the hymn "Watchman Tell us of the Night." The orchestra, augmented by distant ensembles, suggests that the questions of the hymn can be asked of many worlds. The hymn tune itself, of course, if very much off-key in relation to everything going on in the orchestra. Again, words do not offer a solid foundation. The second movement, called the Comedy, is the scherzo to end all Ivesian scherzos. For a little over ten minutes, the listener is bombarded with everything going on in early twentieth century America all at the same time. The vigorous hymns, the ragtime, the marches are all run together so that they can hardly be differentiated. There is an element of stability in the small ensemble that represents the pilgrims from Hawthorne's "Celestial Railway" (again) but they are mostly drowned out by the rest of Americana. The third movement, likes the "Alcotts" movement in the Concord Sonata, is another interlude. This time, it is both the dignity and the limitations of conventional worship that are portrayed through a double fugue built on two hymn-tunes. The finale is perhaps Ives' greatest masterpiece. Two slow march rhythms in different time meters combine to unite their steps in a higher unity. The listener follows the blurred tread of the familiar Gospel hymns "Nearer my God to Thee" and "Missionary Chant," along a road that grows broader with every step. The chorus enters again, for the first time since the beginning, singing bits of "Nearer my God to Thee," but not to any of the words. Then the voices fade out and the percussion battery sounds by itself, deep into the night of silence. In the Comedy, all the familiar tunes of New England clash against each other. In the finale, the fabric of tunes dissolve into an ineffable unity. The listener is taken deep into the future of the cosmos where a transfigured Danbury, Connecticut unfolds in the Mind of God.