Charles Edward Ives. A Yankee from Connecticut. Born in one century and developed in another. His shadow in two fields- insurance and music- cast long expanses of shade. There are a few reasons that I find him inspirational.First, his music does not allow easy digestion on first hearing. He has layers of melodic line, harmony and texture. His specific musical references may be archaic to my ears from the 20th and 21st century but his combinatorial powers are as fresh as ever.
If something musical does not allow repeated hearings without reducting into a staid bland pap of sound, then there is a potential in that music that I personally may wish to return again and again to it. The music of Elliott Carter, Dmitri Shostakovich and Karlheinz Stockhausen come to mind. A risk in their music is that density and dissonance will become the end result in itself. Beauty, however, comes in the thorns as well as in the flower.
On the other side of that coin is the music of Arvo Part and Jan Garbarek among others for whom music almost attains the form and movement of a glacier. There is not a pap of sound but a measured metamorphic transformation from one moment to the next. As a singer, I look forward to someday tackling some of the works of Part with my fellow singers in the Festival Singers of Kansas City.
Second, the actual forms of Ives' music are interesting to me. The actual structure of his piano works especially gives me inspiration for my own work. Since I do not "hear" my compositions when I look at them on the page, I must rely on playing them back through the difficult medium of the MIDI interface. As I compose, I often have relied on a more visual mode of selection than an aural one. Without specifically giving examples, let it suffice to be said that Ives' work in print and in recorded and played expression has given me tremendous encouragement. He is the mentor I never met who gave me some of the permission to go "off the path."
