Charles Ives

Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer Charles Ives (1874-1954) is regarded as one of the most revolutionary composers of all time. Ives was a gifted pianist and organist, and a composition student of Horatio Parker (1863-1919) at Yale University. But his greatest influence came from his father, George Ives (d.1894), a bandmaster who encouraged musical experimentation and used unconventional teaching techniques, such has having his sons sing in one key while he accompanied them in another. Charles Ives gave up music as a profession in 1902 and went on to make his fortune in the insurance industry, but he continued to compose until 1923. From about 1900 forward he produced pieces that anticipated many of the compositional techniques that became hallmarks of mid-20th-Century Modernism, including the use of polytonality, polyrhythms, tone clusters, and microtones--even though his very non-traditional pieces mostly went unperformed until decades after they were written.

Another favorite device is quoting folksongs, hymntunes and popular songs, and this is used with intentionally humorous effect in TSIAJ ("This Scherzo is a Joke"), the second of the three movements from his Piano Trio, which Ives worked on intermittently between 1904 and 1915.