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
Every great inspiration is but an experiment - though every experiment we know, is not a great inspiration.
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'
You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.
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.
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?
The word 'beauty' is as easy to use as the word 'degenerate.' Both come in handy when one does or does not agree with you
It is more important to keep the horse going hard than to always play the exact notes.
Is not beauty in music too often confused with something which lets the ears lie back in an easy chair?