He has been accused of gimmickry and pilloried but the unorthodox work of Charles Ives deserves its place at the heart of this year's Edinburgh International Festival

Published on Friday 26 March 2010 18:23

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."

THE scribbled note containing these words was discovered by Arnold Schoenberg's widow a few years after her husband's death. It had been written in the 1940s by Schoenberg when he was living in Los Angeles. It was, in effect, the unqualified admiration by one unique individual of another. Charles Ives, like Arnold Schoenberg, made up his own rules and then lived by them.

To discover what Schoenberg was on about, look no further than this year's Festival music programme, which is peppered with enough smatterings of Ives to suggest a deliberate attempt by Festival director Jonathan Mills to make the so-called "father of American music" a featured presence. But isn't that what festivals are all about – an opportunity to give neglected art the kind of exposure that routine concert life fails to deliver? When do we ever get the chance to hear the substantial Concord Sonata, with all its intellectual references to such transcendental writers as Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott and Hawthorne, and its literal references to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony? Welsh pianist Llyr Williams performs it as part of the regular Festival morning concerts at the Queen's Hall, and in its version for optional viola (Jane Atkins) and flute (Juliette Bausor).

Or what about the quirkily-named 3 page Sonata, which Steven Osborne includes in his recital in the same series, this time among the mixed company of Scott Joplin, George Crumb, Oscar Peterson and Rachmaninov? Or the audacious and extravagant fourth symphony, or the better-known Variations on America?

Every one of these works is a living example of the conundrum that was, and to some extent still is, Ives.

The problem is threefold. Firstly, his music is so unusual, so quirky – even to modern ears – that we can mistake it as being more gimmick than substance. Secondly, he was a complete and deep-thinking individual, with no qualms about speaking his strange mind. And thirdly, and partly as a result of the first two points, it is only periodically performed. It's easy to understand why the charge of gimmickry might arise. After all, this was a man, born in 1874, who threaded together a set of organ variations on the tune we know as "God save the Queen" – including a delightfully irreverent tango version in the minor key – with wildly dissonant bi-tonal links that sound to the first-time listener like maniacal aberrations, but which, in 1891, were clearly way ahead of their time.

American organist Joela Jones performs these on the Usher Hall organ in a concert shared with the Cleveland Orchestra and – how's this for an eccentric Ivesian juxtaposition? – Bruckner's Eighth Symphony, conducted by Franz Welser-Mst.

As a composer, Ives was unorthodox in every way. He made his money as a highly successful insurance man, creating his own commercial company and effectively formulating the model of modern day life insurance. Yet his musical training was rigorous – at Yale with Horatio Parker – even if as a student his singular mind marked him out as radical and individual.

He had his father to thank for that – a bandmaster who would actively encourage his organist son to write harmony in multiple keys, and to listen from the church steeple to the clashing sounds of several bands playing different music on the town square at the same time. Such cacophony was to find its way into Ives' own music, even the fourth symphony which the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Edinburgh Festival Chorus under Gunther Schuller perform in an all-American Usher Hall programme – Red, White and Blue – right at the start of the Festival. Look no further than the second movement, which makes effective use of a gargantuan ensemble that includes organ, something called an ether organ (normally played on either a synthesiser or a theremin, neither of which were even invented when Ives completed the symphony in 1916), a piano tuned a quarter-tone sharp, the inevitable multiple effect of out-of-tune amateur bands playing at the one time, and the comic interjection of such popular tunes as Camptown Races and Yankee Doodle Dandy.

Also weaved into that symphony, alongside other such ethereal effects as a "vox angelica" of distant violins and harps, are the many American hymn tunes Ives grew up with in small town Connecticut, including a fugue on the tune "From Greenland's icy mountains", taken from his first string quartet and a finale built on the tune "Nearer my God to thee".

These are anything but a sign of sentimentality. They are expressions of Ives's deep spirituality, intellect and conviction. He himself described the finale as an "apotheosis of the preceding content as it relates to the reality of existence and its religious experience". Perhaps that's why he once again feeds a quote from Beethoven's Fifth into the music.

The composer, conductor and musical writer Nicolas Slonimsky, who met Ives through fellow composer Henry Cowell and championed his music, frequently defended suggestions that Ives's isolated stance diminished his artistic credibility. "There was something endearingly old-fashioned in his way of life," wrote Slonimsky in his autobiographical book Perfect Pitch. "He spoke in trenchant aphorisms, akin to the language of Thoreau and Emerson, and he wrote in a similarly forceful manner. He possessed a natural wisdom combined with an eloquent simplicity of utterance."

And if Slonimsky is to be trusted, Ives also appears to have called a spade a spade, labelling Arturo Toscanini a "nice old lady" and Serge Koussevitzky a "soft seat". He also got angry with publishers' copyists who frequently questioned his strange harmonies. "Please don't make things nice; all the wrong notes are right!" he would reply.

Such unshakeable belief is a cipher that runs throughout Ives's entire musical output, the individualism of which was as genuine as it was visionary. He fused American vernacular with the prevailing wind of post-Romantic European experimentalism, thus setting the blueprint for the distinctive modernist trends of 20th century America, and the later voices of Copland, Bernstein and Carter. For that alone, his prominent role in this Festival is justified.

&149 Music by Charles Ives will feature in the following concerts: Rhapsodies in Red, White and Blue at the Usher Hall, Saturday 14 August, sponsored by Prudential; Cleveland Orchestra at the Usher Hall, Tuesday 17 August; Llyr Williams at the Queen's Hall, Saturday 28 August, supported by Dunard Fund USA; and Steven Osborne at the Queen's Hall, Tuesday 31 August.