Recently I was listening to some music by an American composer named Charles Ives. Born in Connecticut in 1874—the son of a bandleader in Ulysses S. Grant's army—Ives isn’t really widely known among the general population, but among musicians he’s often mentioned as one of the few American orchestral composers who can stand alongside those from Europe. By profession, he was an insurance agent.
In 1891 when he was 17, Ives began writing a piece for the Fourth of July celebrations at the Methodist Church in Brewster, New York where he was an organist. It was a theme-and-variations arrangement of the tune we know as “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” which was pretty much the standard national anthem at that time. He said his footwork on the organ pedals was “almost as much fun as playing baseball.” Just then he was the captain of his school baseball team.
He wrote his remarkable Second Symphony between 1897 and 1902, but it wasn’t even performed until 1952. Leonard Bernstein was among those who in the 1950s tirelessly championed the then mostly unknown Ives and his music, describing his work as having “all the freshness of a naïve American wandering in the grand palaces of Europe.” Like many of his pieces, this has snippets of American hymns and folk songs woven through it, and European passages that sound like Dvorak and Beethoven.
Once you start picking up on it, you find yourself listening for any trace of your cultural patrimony. There’s a hymn, then a piece of Stephen Foster's “Camptown Races.” There’s something that sounds like Dvorak’s New World Symphony. Suddenly trumpets cut through with “Reveille,” clear as the dawn breaking. As if to answer, the low brass comes in with “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean.”
Bernstein calls Ives “our musical Mark Twain, Emerson, and Lincoln all rolled into one,” and notes that for all his influences and musical quotations, Ives doesn’t sound like any other composer: It’s “a new brew out of a European soup pot, very American in flavor,” he says.
In a way, things like Ives’ Second Symphony speak to us because they remind us that we’re a nation of immigrants. Not merely of people, but of the culture they brought with them. Beethoven’s style of music itself was an immigrant to the new world, and once here, it interacted with the culture that was already here and so produced something new. Something of a melting pot. Something very American.
