Aegis 2011
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Charles Ives’s Variations on “America”: An American Original >>> Zachary D. Garster Variations on “America,” one of the early works by American composer Charles E. Ives, draws influences from a multitude of sources. Charles Ives was a very inventive and original composer who had an innate boyish charm about him, largely due to the influence of his father, George Ives. Exterior influences, of which Ives may not have been entirely cognizant at the time, and which included popular culture, western music, patriotism, and even gender roles, were also ingredients involved in the creation of his Variations on “America.” This whirlwind of ideas and influences were put to effective use in his composition of this 1891 work. Between the ages of 15 and 16, Charles’s father, George E. Ives, studied counterpoint and harmony with German-born composer Carl Foeppl in New York. This was perhaps the start of his career as a very successful musician, studying four instruments and serving as a Civil War Brigade Bandmaster for the Union Army—in fact, the youngest bandmaster in the Union Army at that time.1 Charles Edward Ives was born on October 20, 1874 in Danbury, Connecticut, in the same year of George Edward Ives’s marriage to Mary Elizabeth Parmalee on the first of January. Two years later, their second child, J. Moss Ives, was born.2 Figure 1: Charles Ives ca. 1946 Shortly following the Ives family’s swift conception, they were established as one of Danbury’s most prominent families. Despite the family’s inherent lack of financial affluence, they were involved in local philanthropy and supported causes including the abolishment of slavery and overall public betterment.3 While the family was certainly well known and successful in business later on, George Ives was merely a bandleader. It cannot be asserted that George was ever successful in supporting the family financially; in addition, many members of the surrounding society found Mr. Ives to be plainly strange. George Ives was quite experimental by nature, commonly constructing odd contraptions and apparatuses that produced unusual sounds. For example, he loved quartertones so much that he retuned the family piano to quartertone tuning at one point as an exercise.4 As told by a witness and acquaintance of the Ives family, George had been remembered to set up two bands in separate ends of town, playing different tunes in non-similar keys and meters. They would then march through the town, eventually converging and clashing together into a musical whirlwind that many considered nothing more than noise.5 Even amidst the town’s distaste for some of his bizarre hobbies, “George’s freeranging mind provided the ideal circumstances to stimulate his son’s intuitive nature.”6 Given his generous support and guidance, it’s no secret why Charles’s education, as provided by his father, gave him a supply of prolific ideas that, at the time of their use, were quite ahead of their time by all accounts.
