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Sometime in the summer of 1898 Ives moved in with a group of Yale men, most of them from the classes of ’97 and ’98, who had rented two apartments on opposite sides of the fourth floor of 317 West 58th Street. About half were studying medicine at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons; the rest were starting out in law or business. Until his marriage ten years later Ives stuck with this living arrangement as both the cast of characters and the location of “Poverty Flat” itself changed, first to 65 Central Park West in 1901, then to 34 Gramercy Park in 1907. (The name was probably a takeoff on the title of a melodrama of the period about a hard-luck mining town in Colorado, “Poverty Flats.”) The first location was definitely a rough neighborhood, at the edge of Hell’s Kitchen, and walking up and down the stairs the Yale men were routinely solicited by the prostitutes operating out of one of the floors below. The apartments were furnished with a few rudimentary and dilapidated pieces of furniture, and in a letter a half century later one of Ives’s roommates recalled their bachelor squalor: “Our clothes hung together on the line as a sort of ‘community chest’ from which any of us who wanted to make a big splurge was allowed to pick the best pair of pants and coat.”1 The church near Newark where Ives had been hired as organist and music director was the First Presbyterian in Bloomfield, New Jersey, and he played his first Sunday there sometime that summer as well. To help actually make a living he had taken a starting job as a clerk at the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York. It was, as Amelia Van Wyck related , something of “a family business”; an Ives relative by marriage, Robert Granniss, was a vice president, and a cousin, Dr. Granville M. White, chapter 5 Damn Rot and Worse Damn Rot and Worse • 91 the son of Colonel Nelson White, was a medical officer and secretary of the company. Ives began at a salary of five dollars a week, or so he recollected four decades later.2 With his own choir to direct at First Presbyterian, Ives continued to focus his serious compositional efforts on church music. Some of his psalms and sacred choral pieces from this period continued to “break the rules” with multiple tonalities, chords built up of stacks of equal intervals, and other challenges to conventional ideas of harmonic development; at Christmas that year he played an organ prelude, “Adeste Fidelis,” that combined two keys. (His misspelling of the Latin—it should have been Fideles—was another reminder of how little his years of compulsory classics studies had sunk in). Ives jotted on the manuscript afterward the reaction of the congregation: “Christmas 98 Service Bloomfield nj played as Preludes Rev J. B Lee, others & Mrs Uhler said it was awful.” His Psalm 67, perhaps the loveliest of his surviving short choral works, creates a more haunting tension between the male and female voices in different tonalities; it is a sound that would later become almost a cliché in modern church music but was far ahead of its time when Ives did it. Years later he joked to Lehman Engel, when the young conductor was preparing to perform the work with his Madrigal Singers in the late 1930s, that he was just trying to capture the sound of the church choir back at his home in Danbury , which “always sounded to him as though it were singing in two keys simultaneously,” but it may not have entirely been a joke: although there is much that smacks of theoretical tinkering in these works, of inventing new rules and systems of harmony for their own sake, there is also even here a hint of what would be Ives’s most enduring trait as a composer, of writing music that is a story about music and music making itself. Other of his sacred choral works from this time, even as they range from harmonically experimental to schmaltzy, sometimes in a single piece, evoke the sound of Anglican plainchant and a boys’ choir in an echoing cathedral , that image somehow intensified and focused by being seen through a dreamy, distorted, discordant foreground.3 Early in the year 1900 Ives became organist and choirmaster at Central Presbyterian Church on West 57th Street in Manhattan, and as his fellow Poverty Flat resident Edwards Park...

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