ESSAY #2

Essay #2: Charles Ives and Aaron Copland

Essay #2: Charles Ives and Aaron Copland

Charles Ives

Charles Edward Ives was a United States composer of classical music, widely recognized as one of the first international significance. Ives's music was largely ignored during his lifetime, and many of his works remained without touching for many years. Over time, Ives would come to be regarded as one of the "American Originals", a composer who adopted an American unique style, American folk tunes woven throughout his compositions, and a restless search for the musical possibilities. His best known works are The Unanswered Question for orchestra and Sonata "Concord" for piano.

Charles Edward Ives was born in 1874 in Danbury, Connecticut. It follows first the advice of his father George, an amateur musician full of fantasy. Military bandmaster, George Ives is from his band, divided into several groups, and places to be at the center of town playing different music. This idea of ??free superposition of melodies, harmonies and rhythms have a strong impact on the music of Charles.

The music of Charles Ives includes symphonies, sonatas, and a very important series of melodies, chamber music and choral works. His style made of free associations, experiments with random processes, quarter-tones, quotes, collages, in short, a range that will be used extensively during the twentieth century. It is an intuitive musician whose imaginative universe has its roots in American society of his time. It can be considered equivalent in America, a land with no tradition of Arnold Schoenberg, composer of strong European tradition, which is the exact contemporary (Ivashkin, 1991).

The importance of the work of Ives is considerable. This so-called amateur, the father of American music was long unknown to the majority of music lovers, trained at the European School of Stravinsky, Debussy and Schoenberg. In him were combined the basic gestures of musical creation: the world of sound listening environment, production scale of the work, experimenting with new forms and situations, building a world ever. By weaving the jumble skein, Ives has shown to the music of the twentieth century that the novelty did not necessarily is the way of critical thinking and that of history or the constitution of a syntax such as had left assuming the patients of innovative Viennese School. Ives combines the creative genius of a "Sunday composer" that fears no audacity, to the rigorous discipline required by the composition. Although a solid musical training, he appears self-made man, in that it has complied with any model from Europe, or any way of this young nation, the United States of America in the early years of the twentieth century.

Before Charles Ives, there was no real American classical music. The sounds cape of the young United States of America was divided between the melodies of Stephen Collins Foster salon, heirs of romantic ballads popular in Europe; many dance tunes, military music, church hymns, of black popular music. Imports were welcomed by European high society who thronged to listen to visiting ...