Variations on "America"

Long before Aaron Copland penned his ballet music to Appalachian Spring and Rodeo, well-known works that critics lauded as having established a uniquely “American” sound in music, there was another American composer growing up in rural Connecticut—listening to the village bands playing in the town square and singing hymns and Civil War-era songs around the campfire. The son of a Union Army bandmaster, Charles Ives was born in 1874, two years before Brahms finished his first symphony. His earliest exposure to music came via his bandmaster father, a full-time musician who played, taught, conducted, and organized virtually every musical endeavor in the town of Danbury. Ives’ father was an unorthodox innovator who was known to mount various musical “experiments,” such as stationing bands at opposite ends of the town square and having them play different pieces in different keys as they marched toward and past each other—just to see how it sounded. He also embraced amateur musicians. Ives remembered he and his father hearing an old stonemason singing hymns off-key, and his father advising him to "Look into his face and hear the music of the ages. Don't pay too much attention to the sounds—for if you do, you may miss the music.” It was an open-minded approach that embraced the idea that anyone and everyone could make music, and that music played on a poorly tuned country fiddle in the town square was just as legitimate as music played on a Stradivarius in a gilded concert hall. Ives grew up believing that music was for everyone and that no sounds were “off limits,” and during his almost 80 years, alongside a steady output of more traditional songs, he produced some of the most unique, unexpected, experimental, forward-thinking, fearless, and thoroughly “American” music the world had ever seen.

Beginning music lessons with his father at the age of five, Ives would eventually turn his attention to the organ as his primary instrument, becoming the youngest salaried church organist in Connecticut at age 14. It was also around this time that he began composing—marches, church songs, fiddle tunes—the type of music he had grown up with. At age 17, he composed a larger-scale work for organ, the innovative Variations on “America”, which he penned for a Fourth of July celebration by his employer, the Methodist church in Brewster, New York. Ives performed the variations in local churches while still a teen and continued tinkering with them throughout adulthood. Variations on “America,” which Ives later described as "but a boy's work, partly serious and partly in fun,” is a witty, somewhat irreverent set of variations on the popular tune “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” which was at the time considered the de facto national anthem of the United States. It is a precocious work, showing that even at the age of 17, Ives was already experimenting with polytonality (composing music in two different keys simultaneously). Although incredibly proud of his son’s work, his father apparently once forbade Ives to perform some of the polytonal variations in church, saying, “They upset the elderly ladies and make the little boys laugh and get noisy!” Variations on “America” was not published until 1948, after the organist E. Power Biggs discovered and recorded it. In 1962, the composer William Schuman transcribed the work for orchestra, and the orchestral version was premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 1964.

The work opens with a jolly introduction that incorporates snippets of the famous tune. Not long into it, Ives takes a few surprising “left turns” harmonically, as if to give us a hint of what is to come. The introduction is followed by a solemn presentation of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” in the brass, accompanied by pizzicato strings. We are then treated to five wildly disparate variations on the tune. Like circus acts following one after the other, we are treated to frenzied woodwinds, barbershop quartet-style writing, a variation that veers far astray into polytonality before morphing into a quirky waltz, Spanish castanets, cornet acrobatics, and a rousing conclusion. The writing is flamboyant, grandiose, charming, and above all, incredibly creative and skillful. The short work ends before we’ve had time to fully digest what we’re hearing and inevitably leaves the audience wanting more.

Ives would go on to compose over 700 works, including six symphonies, smaller orchestral works, chamber music, keyboard music, and choral music, all while enjoying a highly successful career in the insurance business. (Ives & Myrick would become the largest insurance agency in the country, generating enormous profits.) Despite his enviable business success, however, Ives’ music remained virtually unknown. In the late 1920s, composers Henry Cowell and Aaron Copland began to promote Ives’ music, but live performances were rare. Finally, in 1947, Ives was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his Third Symphony, a work that he had finished in 1910, and in 1951, Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic gave the world premiere of Ives’ First Symphony, a work he had begun in 1898. Broader recognition had just begun when Ives died in 1954.

In many ways, the music world is still getting to know Charles Ives, whose wildly creative approach to composing was decades ahead of its time. Undeterred by years of toiling in obscurity and having his music rejected as incomprehensible, Ives had soldiered on, showing what Aaron Copland called “the courage of a lion.” He is perhaps best summed up in the words of composer Arnold Schoenberg, whose music was known worldwide. After Schoenberg’s death in 1951, his widow found a note in his desk where Schoenberg had written, “There is a great Man living in this Country—a composer. He has solved the problem of how to preserve one's self-esteem and to learn. He responds to negligence by contempt. He is not forced to accept praise or blame. His name is Ives.”