Charles Ives
Charles Ives
Charles Edward Iveswas an American modernist composer. He is one of the first American composers of international renown, though his music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Over time, he came to be regarded as an "American original". He combined the American popular and church-music traditions of his youth with European art music, and was among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, with musical...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionComposer
Date of Birth20 October 1874
CityDanbury, CT
CountryUnited States of America
Charles Ives quotes about
For the man of talent affects to call his transgressions of the laws of sense trivial and to count them nothing considerd with his devotion to his art.
If idioms are more to be born than to be selected, then the things of life and human nature that a man has grown up with--(not that one man's experience is better than another's, but that it is 'his.')--may give him something better in his substance and manner than an over-long period of superimposed idiomatic education which quite likely doesn't fit his constitution. My father used to say, 'If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he might better stick to the horse, and some day the horse may carry him into heaven'
But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense.
In some century to come, when the school children will whistle popular tunes in quarter-tones--when the diatonic scale will be as obsolete as the pentatonic is now--perhaps then these borderland experiences may be both easily expressed and readily recognized. But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense
Stand up and take your dissonance like a man.
Every great inspiration is but an experiment - though every experiment we know, is not a great inspiration.
You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.
There can be nothing exclusive about substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of the experience of life and thinking about life and living life.
I don't write music for sissy ears.
Please don't try to make things nice! All the wrong notes are right. Just copy as I have -- I want it that way.
The possibilities of percussion sounds, I believe, have never been fully realized
If a composer has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?
Every great inspiration is but an experiment.
A song has a few rights the same as ordinary citizens... if it happens to feel like flying where humans cannot fly... to scale mountains that are not there, who shall stop it?