Charles Ives at 150:
Music, Imagination, and American Culture
Welcome to the digital archive for Charles Ives at 150: Music, Imagination, and American Culture, a festival celebrating the sesquicentennial of an iconic American creative genius, held September 30 through October 8, 2024, at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington.
Born October 20, 1874, in Danbury, Connecticut, Ives grew up absorbing popular songs and fiddle tunes, playing drums in his father’s band and piano in the parlor, singing hymns and playing organ in church and at revivals, practicing Bach and Mendelssohn preludes and fugues, and composing everything from band marches, choral anthems, and virtuoso organ variations to experimental pieces that tried out new sounds.
He studied counterpoint, composition, and orchestration at Yale. Then he moved to New York, where he made a fortune in his day job as cofounder of the most innovative insurance agency in the nation. With the encouragement of his wife Harmony, he spent evenings, weekends, and vacations composing symphonies, string quartets, sonatas, choral music, and songs. Blending into these classical genres the sounds of American popular music, hymns, and his own innovative techniques, he created highly individual works that celebrate American life, history, literature, music, and people.
No other creative artist has so embodied or optimistically espoused a resource never more precious than now, when our national fabric is shredding: American cultural memory. It’s the very substance of the musical idiom he invented, saturated with particles of remembrance intermingling in a patriotic cloud.
We explored all of this during our nine-day festival. This online archive includes video recordings of all the concerts, colloquia, and panels, along with a timeline of Ives’s life, programs for every event, program notes for the concerts, and biographies for the artists and speakers.
Starting with “Charles Ives: A Life in Music” (a playlet using Ives’s songs to tell the story of his life), the festival’s twelve concerts feature band and orchestral music, chamber and solo works, songs, and choral music. The concerts incorporate commentary, even a “visual presentation” to accompany the performance of Three Places in New England.
The festival’s colloquia and panels feature talks and conversations that illuminate Ives’s connections to American history, literature, and visual art—and how his music can help us understand America, what it is and might be, in his time and in ours.
To view the video recordings, programs, and program notes, click on the Events link above for the complete schedule with links to each event.
Our thanks to Katie Chapman for creating and maintaining this website, and to Indiana University Research and the Charles Ives Society for financial support to make it possible.
J. Peter Burkholder and Joseph Horowitz, festival co-organizers