Mad Music: Charles Ives, the Nostalgic Rebel

3 | Scenes from My Childhood

Sometime around 1840 George W. Ives dutifully purchased a square piano for the front parlor of the Main Street house to provide his children with a proper musical education. Neither Charles’s free-spirited Uncle Joe and Uncle Ike nor his strong-willed Aunt Amelia proved to have the necessary discipline or talent, and having wasted his money on piano lessons for his three older children George Ives decided not to bother with music lessons for his fourth and youngest, George Edward. He changed his mind, or so the family story went that Amelia Van Wyck heard years later, when young George announced one Fourth of July that he would prefer to stay home, and miss all the day’s fun, because he had the chance to make some money doing yard work for a neighbor and was trying to earn enough to buy a flute.1 In any event, it was soon apparent that George had both a talent and seriousness of purpose about music that his siblings lacked. By age fourteen he was playing cornet in the Danbury Brass Band, and not long after that, in August 1860, his father agreed to send him to New York to study full time with a German music master, Charles Foepple, who was living in what was then the rural village of Morrisania, now part of the South Bronx. Until the Civil War interrupted his studies two years later—he would resume them again for another two and a half years after the war— George lived at Foepple’s house, learning music theory, traveling into the city on Saturdays for a weekly cornet lesson and to attend occasional Philharmonic Society concerts. The notebooks he kept show that he received a rigorous, traditional grounding in harmony and counterpoint, beginning with simple exercises of harmonizing a bass line, followed by chapter 3 Scenes from My Childhood Scenes from My Childhood • 39 more complex harmonic progressions, single and double counterpoint, and the composition of fugues. Foepple also had his pupil copy out numerous models, mostly Bach chorales and other Baroque choral works but also operatic excerpts from Gluck and from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and analyze and identify all of the chords. If this selection of mostly high Baroque church music was, as the pianist and musicologist Larry Wallach observed, “practically useless for repertory purposes” for an aspiring professional musician in mid-nineteenth century America like George E. Ives, it nonetheless showed the “high degree of musical awareness” of his German-trained teacher, and if nothing else offered “a badge of learnedness and hence respectability” in a profession still often considered to be something distinctly less than respectable.2 In September 1862 Nelson L. White—he was George W. Ives’s first cousin and lieutenant colonel of the 1st Connecticut Heavy Artillery— was back in Danbury seeking additional volunteers for the “First Heavies ” when he approached George E. Ives about forming a band for the regiment. George recruited a dozen fellow musicians, mostly Germans he had come to know in New York. Just seventeen years old, he became the youngest band leader in the Union army.3 Judging by the one brief, surviving comment he left about his war service , it had not been a very happy experience. “A space of Three years servitude as Leader . . . & one year sick, from Sept/62 to Sept/’66,” he jotted afterwards in one of his music notebooks.4 Many Northern volunteers, especially those from New England and the parts of western New York and Ohio settled by New Englanders, were imbued with a strong sense of individualism and antiauthoritarian egalitarianism and were frankly astonished to encounter what they termed the “monarchical and aristocratic ” tyranny of regular army discipline; the records of the Union army are full of soldiers being court-martialed for resisting what they deemed unjust orders, drafting petitions to their officers to complain of improper treatment, or demanding that they be permitted to elect their officers (as had been the tradition in New England militia units). During the siege of Petersburg, Virginia, in June 1864, George Ives burst out with his own rebellion against army discipline. Either out of pique at some unstated slight or dissatisfaction that he was not part of the real fighting, on June 29 he drafted a letter to his commanding officer stiffly 40 • mad music requesting that he be “reduced to the ranks as a private sentinel.” When that...