Cantankerous Yankee

Conductor Leopold Stokowski hushed the audience in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall. "Tonight," he said, "we are honoring one of America's greatest artists ..." From the back of the hall came a shattering sneeze. "That," cracked Stokowski, "is not part of the score." It easily could have been.

The occasion was the world premiere of Charles Ives's Fourth Symphony, and if not with sneezes, the score was alive with musical snorts and snickers, hiccups and heehaws. It was one of the most difficult symphonies ever played --more, in fact, than any one conductor could handle. To help referee such rowdy goings-on as 27 different rhythms being played at the same time, Stokowski stationed auxiliary conductors in the string and percussion sections. Miraculously, they shaped all the disparate elements into a musical experience of rare delight. The Fourth Symphony was a masterpiece, another great work from what an increasing number of people believe is America's greatest composer.

Polyphonic Thickets. That the symphony was played at all was no small triumph. Ives wrote it half a century ago, and, as was his wont, haphazardly stuffed parts of it into desk drawers and notebooks around the house. When he died at 80 in 1954, what remained of the final movement was an incomplete jumble of illegible manuscripts. Then, by chance, the missing pages of the movement were discovered in an old trunk, and musicologists set about the laborious task of deciphering Ives's penciled scrawlings. The polyphonic thickets were so incredibly dense that it took ten years to work the movement into playable shape.

As with most of Ives's music, his Fourth Symphony is sprinkled with snatches of religious, patriotic and folk tunes popular at the turn of the century. But once shredded by Ives, run through a wringer of dissonance and woven into his complex fabric of rhythms, they were not easily recognized. In the first movement, for example, the doom-laden theme in the basses sounded against a background of Nearer, My God, to Thee, softly played by a chamber ensemble isolated at the rear of the orchestra. Then the violins joined in with The Sweet Bye and Bye, intertwined with clashes of brass and drums and another hymn sung by an 18-voice chorus. The second movement, beginning with a blaring Marching Through Georgia, erupted into a cacophonous frenzy, while above and below individual instruments unconcernedly picked out Yankee Doodle and Turkey in the Straw, After a soothingly lovely third movement, the work ended with a majestic, anthem'ike march.

One of the reasons his works were so long neglected was that Ives scared off every commercial music publisher by insisting that he receive no royalties and they no profits. As a result, his Third Symphony lay unplayed in his West Redding, Conn., barn for 42 years before it was finally performed--and then it won the Pulitzer Prize (1947). Cantankerous Yankee that he was, Ives was repelled at the prospect of remuneration for his art. "Prizes, bah! They are the badge of mediocrity!" he roared when told of the Pulitzer award.

Isolated Visionary. Born in Danbury, Conn., Ives was the son of the town bandmaster. After graduating from Yale, Ives went into the insurance business to avoid "starving on dissonances," helped found the firm of Ives & Myrick, which upon his retirement in 1930 was the nation's largest insurance sales agency. Evenings, weekends and lunch hours he devoted to composing music. Shunning newspapers, radios and concert halls, he worked in a visionary's isolation, turning out a steady stream of revolutionary works that presaged by decades the atonal experiments of Schoenberg and Stravinsky.

The stress of this double life eventually took its toll. One day in 1927, troubled by a nervous disorder that distorted his hearing, he came to his wife with tears in his eyes and confessed that "I can't seem to compose any more." His creative life over at 53, he became a recluse.

That recognition never came to him during his lifetime did not bother Ives one whit. The composer, he explained, "whether he be accepted or rejected, whether his music is always played or never played--all this has nothing to do with it--it is true or false by his own measure."

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