From Stoeckel to Hindemith: The Early Years of the Yale School of Music
Charles Ives
Charles Ives
Graduation photograph
1898
Born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1874, Charles Ives studied music with a variety of teachers, including his father George, a town bandmaster whose eclectic tastes influenced his son. Charlie showed his talents early, and by the age of 14 he was already a professional church musician.
In 1893, Ives became a student at the Hopkins School in New Haven, and in 1894 he enrolled at Yale College, from which he graduated in 1898. During his student years, he also worked as a church musician at St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church and then at Center Church on the New Haven Green. Ives’s student experience at Yale was typical for his era. He studied classical and modern languages and literatures as well as math and history, he was enthusiastic about collegiate sports, and he belonged to Delta Kappa Epsilon and Wolf’s Head. Ives studied music with the renowned Horatio Parker, who honed his skills in harmony, counterpoint, and form. Parker and Ives did not always see eye-to-eye, as Ives was already showing a fondness for bold dissonances that had no place in Parker’s more traditional style, but the experience was nonetheless productive for the younger composer, and helped form the basis of his future technique.
After graduating from Yale, Ives worked as a church musician and composer for a while, but eventually decided to pursue a career in the insurance business, where he was extremely successful. In his spare time, he continued to compose, though his works were rarely performed. In 1918 he became seriously ill with diabetes, and his medical problems curtailed his work in both music and insurance. His final three and half decades were spent largely in seclusion.
During this long retirement, Ives’s music, which had languished in obscurity for many years, began to reach a broader public, thanks to the efforts of a few dedicated and enthusiastic supporters, John Kirkpatrick foremost among them. By the time of his death in 1954, Ives was regarded by many as the great American composer, famous for his highly personal combination of classical forms, modernist dissonance, quotations from diverse musical sources, and transcendental beauty.
Ives’s papers came to Yale after his death, and they were catalogued by Kirkpatrick and Vivian Perlis. (Perlis also interviewed many of his friends and associates, thus laying the groundwork for what is now Oral History of American Music, an ongoing project at the Music Library that celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.) The Ives Papers are perhaps the most intensively studied of all the Music Library’s archival collections.
Charles Ives
String Quartet No. 1
Manuscript, ca. 1897–1900
Ives’s String Quartet No. 1: From the Salvation Army (subtitled “A Revival Service”) dates from his Yale years, and is based largely on organ works that have not survived. Ives later used the first movement in his Fourth Symphony. The quartet did not receive its first documented full performance until 1957, about 60 years after its composition. It was finally published in 1961 and recorded in 1963.
As was his custom, Ives incorporated melodies borrowed from a remarkably diverse array of sources, ranging from hymn tunes and folk songs to Bach and Beethoven. The first movement is a fugue based on the missionary hymn “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains.” This is an especially apt choice for an exhibit at the Yale Music Library, because that tune was composed by the influential American music educator and editor Lowell Mason (1792–1872). Mason’s collection of more than 10,000 manuscripts and rare published works came to Yale after his death, and became the cornerstone of our special collections at the Music Library.