Charles Ives’ vision of America still strikes an unsettling chord

An undated photograph of composer Charles Ives (1874-1954). Pianist Jeremy Denk says "The crusty American composer had no shortage of utopian visions." Bettman/Getty Images hide caption

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Bettman/Getty Images

One hundred-fifty years ago, a mild-mannered insurance man was born in the small Connecticut town of Danbury. On nights and weekends, he composed music, most of which went unperformed in his lifetime. His name is Charles Ives, and after he died in 1954, his reputation slowly grew as America’s first truly original composer.

To mark the anniversary, pianist Jeremy Denk has released the album IVES DENK, with violinist Stefan Jackiw. It contains Ives’ four violin sonatas and his two massive piano sonatas -- some of the composer’s most personal, thorny, confounding and beautiful music.

Ives was a free thinker who wrote music that sounds decades ahead of its time. His wildest ideas were inherited from his father George, a musical jack-of-all-trades and Danbury’s bandleader who instructed his son to sing songs in one key and play the accompaniment in another. In his memoirs, dictated to a secretary in 1930, Ives remembers his father saying, “If you know how to write a fugue the right way, then I’m willing to have you try the wrong way.”

So much of Ives’ music sounds, at least at first hearing, like it was indeed composed the “wrong way.” Ives challenged traditional music theory. In his Violin Sonata No. 2, played with a singular controlled frenzy by Denk and Jackiw, the hymn “Come thou Fount of Every Blessing” barges in, ecstatic, above a piano gone bonkers.

Ives was obsessed with all of the music around him. You never know when snippets of popular church hymns, circus marches, parlor songs or ragtime ditties might weasel their way into a piece. In Ives’ day, his listeners might have thought he was simply playing off popular culture, but in his singular, rugged way, Ives is telling us these songs are part of the gravel that pours into the foundation of American music. In the ramshackle, ragtime-inflected middle movement of the Violin Sonata No. 3 you can hear Ives tinkering with the music, stopping and starting as if he’s trying out ideas on the spot.

His ideas didn’t always land favorably. About the First Violin Sonata, which premiered in San Francisco in 1928 at a concert series designed by Henry Cowell, Ives recalled the day when he invited an acclaimed violinist to his home to perform the piece. “He didn’t even get through the first page,” Ives wrote in his memoir. “He was all bothered with the rhythms and the notes, and he got mad. He said, ‘This cannot be played. It is not music. It makes no sense.’” Denk places the sonata among Ives’ most aspiring works and describes its eerie central movement in the album liner notes as “a jagged musical reflection on the Civil War.”

There’s a kind of freewheeling, “Watch me build it,” swagger in Ives’ music that sounds unmistakably American. Although these pieces were composed over 100 years ago, they sound surprisingly contemporary.

Ives began working on his Piano Sonata No. 1 around 1915, but it would have to wait another 34 years for its public debut. The crepuscular opening movement sounds innocent enough, like something Brahms might have written had he lived another dozen years. Ives quotes both a hymn and a cowboy song -- in Ives the sacred and profane often collide. Some 25 minutes later, just before the ominous final movement, the music couldn’t sound more contrary as the hymn “Bringing in the Sheaves” stumbles in, dangerously belligerent. Denk’s performance is deliciously unhinged.

Ives believed in the utopian possibilities of music. So it’s no surprise that his Piano Sonata No. 2, subtitled “Concord, Mass., 1840-1860,” is inspired by American transcendentalists. It’s a mammoth, all-encompassing work — separate portraits of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorn, and the Alcotts.

Yet common threads are woven through. Right off the bat, at the opening of the “Emerson” movement, there’s a nod to Beethoven’s 5th heard low in the left hand. That da-da-da-daaa theme will eventually evolve into some of Ives’ most tender music in the movement titled “The Alcotts.” At another point in the sonata’s “Hawthorn” section, Ives specifies that a narrow wooden board, exactly 14 -3/4 inches long, be used to depress multiple keys at once. The result is a mysterious cloud of notes in the right hand that floats in opposition to a melody of arpeggiated chords in the left. It could have been just a gimmick, but Ives makes it work beautifully.

These performances by Denk and Jackiw are both delicate and muscular --like Ives’ music, which is filled with contradictions, failure, grace and vision. And it would be difficult to find more satisfying liner notes than those by Denk, whose 2022 memoir Every Good Boy Does Fine offers the same blend of perception and wit. For this album, he sums up the composer for us in 2024, saying that Ives is “optimistic but always messy, always falling apart at the seams. His music suggests America will just have to muddle through, and wrestle with its own failure.”

An album of Ives music, especially one as well played and thought provoking as Ives Denk, is worth engaging with at any time, regardless of the sesquicentennial. That it has been released during an election season fraught with opposing views of what it means to be an American adds a distinct gravitas.