When one thinks of the United States as it was during the last decade of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th, one thinks of a country that possessed an astonishing reservoir of energies - a practical and pragmatic country, bursting with inventiveness and living through the most massive and rapid industrial expansion in the history of the world. But most of the "serious" music that was being created in the USA during those years was nothing like the country itself: the compositions were heavily weighted toward academicism and were tightly tied to the apron-strings of German Romanticism. In those years, only one person successfully found an original, American voice for himself and was able to graft his own striking individuality onto the European musical language that America had inherited. Charles Edward Ives was the son of a military bandmaster, George E. Ives, who provided his son with most of his early musical education - although as a boy the younger Ives seems to have been as interested in baseball and football as in music. At Yale University, he studied composition with Horatio Parker, a relatively well-known composer in his day, but the pupil had difficulty in reconciling his own compositional tendencies, which were freewheeling and experimental from the start, with his teacher's conservatism. When he told his father that Parker wanted him to resolve a dissonant chord, the older man argued that "every dissonance doesn't have to resolve if it doesn't happen to feel like it, any more than every horse should have to have its tail bobbed just because it's the prevailing fashion".

Ives was both a visionary and a pragmatist. As a visionary, he created music of a sort that no one else had even imagined. As a pragmatist, he understood that he would never be able to have a career in music without compromising his ideals. Instead, he moved to New York and entered the insurance business, in which he eventually became highly successful. As a professional musician he worked for only four years - 1898-1902 - as a church organist, and only on Sundays. For the following quarter-century, he composed in his spare time and eventually created a large body of works for orchestra, band, chamber ensembles, piano, choral and other vocal ensembles and accompanied solo voice. In 1908 he married Harmony Twichell, a registered nurse, the daughter of a minister and the sister of one of his former Yale classmates. They had no children of their own, but they adopted a daughter, Edith, to whom they were devoted and who was devoted to them. Ives virtually ceased to write music after the age of 50 - his last work was a song composed in 1926 - and a few years later he retired from the insurance business. During the 1930s, his music began to attract attention from the critics and a select public, and many younger American composers began to see him as the father of a new school of American music. Even Arnold Schoenberg, who was not given to praising his contemporaries, wrote in 1944 - the year of his own and Ives's 70th birthdays: "There is a great Man living in this country - a composer. He has solved the problem how to preserve one's self and to learn. He responds to negligence by contempt. He is not forced to accept praise or blame. His name is Ives." In New York, in May 1954, Ives suffered a severe stroke, and on the 19th of that month, as Harmony and Edith held his hands, he died peacefully at the age of 79.

Harvey Sachs

Biographical notes (c) 1996, by permission of Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Hamburg

A selection of major works:

Orchestral: Central Park in the Dark, Three Places in New England (Orchestral Set No. 1), The Gong on the Hook and Ladder, "Firemen's Parade on Main Street", Holidays Symphony, Orchestral Set No. 2, Robert Browning Overture, 4 Ragtime Dances, 3 Sets for Small Orchestra, 4 Symphonies (including No. 3 "The Camp Meeting"), The Unanswered Question, Universe Symphony, Variations on "America" (orchestrated by William Schuman), Yale-Princeton Football Game

Chamber: From the Steeples and the Mountains, Halloween (piano and string quartet), Holiday Quickstep, 2 String Quartets, Piano Trio, 4 Violin Sonatas

Instrumental solo: The Anti-Abolitionist Riots (piano), 2 Piano Sonatas (including No. 2 "Concord"), Three Page Sonata, Variations on "America" (organ),