Double Indemnity

Charles Edward Ives is a composer U.S. musicians like to talk about--but seldom get to hear. Much of his diffuse, polytonal music is as difficult as trying to play a Bach fugue on a musical saw--and often as strange to listen to. But last week, in Boston, 73-year-old Composer Ives had his innings.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra had its troubles. Some Ives compositions are marked "play as you will." In rehearsal, single measures in Ives's symphonic suite Three Places in New England had to be hashed over as many as ten times. One section has a trumpet blaring the melody of The British Grenadiers in march tempo, while the strings saw away on a waltz. Groaned Assistant Conductor Richard Burgin: "I give the time, but the musicians are not supposed to follow me."

Bristling Rhythms. But in concert, even Boston's dowager matinee audience found Ives's music frequently lyrical, bristlingly individual and tartly humorous.

To many, bristle-bearded Charles Ives is the most original--even if not the most skillful--of all U.S. composers. One New York critic once called his second piano sonata, Concord Mass. 1840-60, "the greatest music composed by an American." He was writing music with strange, exciting rhythms and polytonal harmonies before Stravinsky and Schonberg.

At 13, Charles Ives had written a Holiday Quickstep and been pronounced a genius by the Danbury (Conn.) Evening News. But after Yale, he decided that he couldn't make a living writing the kind of music he wanted to; he went into insurance and became highly successful (he is a retired partner in the Manhattan firm of Ives & Myrick). In his lunch hours and evenings, he composed.

Concert Boycott. Even then, he was a cantankerous recluse. He has never gone to concerts, never reads newspapers, won't have a radio in his house. Now ill, Ives lives simply in a hilltop home in Connecticut with his wife, Harmony.

He has been admitted to the National Institute of Arts & Letters but thinks little of some of his colleagues ("Those slobwogs!"). Last year, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his Third Symphony, unplayed for 36 years while the manuscript gathered dust in his barn. After receiving the prize, he granted a rare newspaper interview. When a reporter congratulated him, he refused to shake hands, roared: "Prizes, bah! What do I care for prizes! They are the badge of mediocrity."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.