Pianist Jeremy Denk, writing in The New York Times, marks the 150th birthday of Charles Ives, the American maverick composer who (in)famously told musicians and their audiences to “stand up and take your dissonance like a man.”
“He dreamed that music would evolve into ‘a language, so transcendent, that its heights and depths will be common to all mankind.’ (This didn’t pan out, unless you count Taylor Swift.) And, in the first two decades of the 20th century, he dreamed up a radically original American musical voice – an enviable triumph that came bundled with failure,” Denk writes. “It was a voice many people didn’t want to hear, and still don’t.”
In the wild ride of an Ives composition, with its recollections of old tunes in olden times colliding with futuristic harmonies and raucous humor, Denk hears “a restless search to find more in America than we thought, or even hoped, to find.”
We’ll mark the Ives’ sesquicentennial on Oct. 20 with three of his most iconic works on this week’s Letter V Classical Radio, 7-9 p.m. EDT/2300-0100 UTC/GMT on WDCE, broadcasting at 90.1 FM, streaming at http://wdce.org
Letter V 