Charles Ives was born 150 years ago, and Joseph Horowitz bemoans in American Scholar the lack of attention paid to the sesquicentenary of a composer he sees as our signal musical representative in a tradition of rough-hewn, homespun experimentation: 

“No other American composer connects more explicitly with the New England Transcendentalist tradition of Emerson and Thoreau … (and) the ragged New World arts species epitomized by Herman Melville.” 

For Horowitz, the “pantheon of the self-created, ‘unfinished’ American genius–the high canon of Emerson, Melville, and Twain, but also Walt Whitman, George Gershwin, and William Faulkner–is Ives’s rightful home.” 

If Horowitz wants to know why performing organizations are passing on an Ives in 2024-25, he might want to listen to the music. The “Concord” Sonata, his most famous piece and one that Horowitz cites as a crowning achievement, is relentless. The “Emerson” movement is a constant onslaught of thick chords of extreme range, usually delivered loudly; I had the feeling of being held underwater as I listened to it. 

Ives’s Second Symphony, another one of the “masterpieces,” is all right, I guess, but there’s nothing in it you couldn’t get out of Vaughan Williams’s English Folk Song Suite or similar piece out of the UK in the first half of the 20th century. At best, the Second Symphony is surprisingly sweet; at worst, it’s boring (and that includes the “mistake” that ends the piece). It is no classic. 

Those in the arts constantly confuse historical interest and aesthetic relevance. There’s no doubt that Ives’s music and writings can tell us a lot about cultural life in the first decades of the twentieth century in the United States, just as his valorization by figures as notable as Bernstein can help explain the values of high-art musicians after World War II. This doesn’t mean his music deserves any more of a presence in the concert hall this year than any other. 

Starting September 30, the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music is hosting a nine-day festival in honor of Ives. I’d say this is more than enough time to listen to his music and talk about his legacy, and in exactly the correct context.